How to extract data from a Wikipedia article?
android, parsing, wikipedia, wikipedia-api, xml
Solution
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§ion=26
to get the HTML for a certain section.
Problem
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!