Searching Wikipedia using API

Question

I want to search Wikipedia using the query action. I am using this url:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&list=search&srsearch=apple

That works but I want to get into the first result of the search. How can I do that?

Note: That url works fine when there is only one result.. I just need the title and some short description.

Answer 1

I don't think you can do both in one query.

1. To get the first result, use the Opensearch API.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=zyz&limit=1&namespace=0&format=jsonfm

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
?action=opensearch
&search=zyz          # search query
&limit=1             # return only the first result
&namespace=0         # search only articles, ignoring Talk, Mediawiki, etc.
&format=json         # jsonfm prints the JSON in HTML for debugging.

This will return:

[
    "Zyz",
    [
        "Zyzomys"
    ],
    [
        ""
    ],
    [
        "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyzomys"
    ]
]

2. You now have the article name of the first search result. To get the article's first paragram (or description, as you call it), see my answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/19781754/908703

Answer 2

actually the wikipedia json api works with a right query only, so I recommend to use the wikipedia search and crawl the actual article and parse it with BeautifulSoup

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=QUERY&title=Special:Search&fulltext=Search

and also there is module call wikipedia does this for you