How to extract data from a Wikipedia article?

Question

I have a question regarding parsing data from Wikipedia for my Android app. I have a script that can download the XML by reading the source from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&prop=text&format=xml&page=ARTICLE_NAME (and also the JSON by replacing format=xml with format=json.

But what I can't figure out is how to only access certain sections from the table of contents. What I want is when the page is loaded, the user can press a button that makes a pop-up appear that displays the headers from the table of contents and allow the user to read that piece and only that piece of it for convenience. I'm a little shaky with JSON but is it possible to do this? Or, is there an API from Wikipedia that allows the developer to only view certain parts of a page?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Unfortunatelly, it seems the mediawiki.org documentation for parse doesn't tell you how to do this. But the documentation in the API itself does: You can use section parameter. And you can use prop=sections to get the list of sections.

So, you could first use:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=parse&page=Android_%28operating_system%29&prop=sections

to get the list of sections and then

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=parse&page=Android_%28operating_system%29&prop=text&section=26

to get the HTML for a certain section.

Answer 2

action=parse doesn't work well with per-section parse, consider this shoert example:

Foo is a bar<ref>really!</ref>
== References ==
<references/>

Parsing just the zeroth section will result in red error message about without while parsing the first one will result in empty references list.

However, there's a better solution: action=mobileview is not only free from this problem, but it's also specifically intended for mobile apps and gives you mobile-optimized HTML.