NAME

WWW::Wikipedia - Automated interface to the Wikipedia

SYNOPSIS

  use WWW::Wikipedia;
  my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new();

  ## search for 'perl' 
  my $result = $wiki->search( 'perl' );

  ## if the entry has some text print it out
  if ( $result->text() ) { 
      print $result->text();
  }

  ## list any related items we can look up 
  print join( "\n", $result->related() );

DESCRIPTION

WWW::Wikipedia provides an automated interface to the Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org, which is a free, collaborative, online encyclopedia. This module allows you to search for a topic and return the resulting entry. It also gives you access to related topics which are also available via the Wikipedia for that entry.

METHODS

new()

The constructor. You can pass it a two letter language code, or nothing to let it default to 'en'.

    ## Default: English
    my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new();

    ## use the French wiki instead
    my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new( language => 'fr' );

WWW::Wikipedia is a subclass of LWP::UserAgent. If you would like to have more control over the user agent (control timeouts, proxies ...) you have full access.

    ## set HTTP request timeout
    my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new();
    $wiki->timeout( 2 );

language()

This allows you to get and set the language you want to use. Two letter language codes should be used. The default is 'en'.

    my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new( language => 'es' );
    
    # Later on...
    $wiki->language( 'fr' );

search()

Which performs the search and returns a WWW::Wikipedia::Entry object which you can query further. See WWW::Wikipedia::Entry docs for more info.

    $entry = $wiki->search( 'Perl' );
    print $entry->text();

If there's a problem connecting to Wikipedia, undef will be returned and the error message will be stored in error().

random()

This method fetches a random wikipedia page.

error()

This is a generic error accessor/mutator. You can retrieve any searching error messages here.

TODO

• Clean up results. Strip HTML.

• Watch the development of Special:Export XML formatting, eg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export/perl

SEE ALSO

• LWP::UserAgent

AUTHORS

• Ed Summers, <ehs@pobox.com>

• Brian Cassidy, <bricas@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2005 by Ed Summers

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

cpanm WWW::Wikipedia

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install WWW::Wikipedia