WWW::Wikipedia (3pm)

  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() );

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.

To install this module type the following:

perl Makefile.PL make make test make install

\fInew()\fP

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 );

You can turn off the following of wikipedia redirect directives by passing a false value to \*(C`follow_redirects\*(C'.

\fIlanguage()\fP

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' );

\fIfollow_redirects()\fP

By default, wikipeda redirect directives are followed. Set this to false to turn that off.

\fIsearch()\fP

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, \*(C`undef\*(C' will be returned and the error message will be stored in \*(C`error()\*(C'.

\fIrandom()\fP

This method fetches a random wikipedia page.

\fIerror()\fP

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

• Clean up results. Strip \s-1HTML\s0.

• Watch the development of Special:Export \s-1XML\s0 formatting, eg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export/perl

• LWP::UserAgent

Ed Summers <[email protected]>

Brian Cassidy <[email protected]>

Copyright 2003-2011 by Ed Summers

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