PHP Code Snippet to retrieve Data from WikiPedia

Details: Category: PHP; Published on Monday, 17 December 2012 15:35; Written by Administrator; Hits: 1107

This interesting code snippet is from cedTag and let you retrieve WikiPedia description using OpenSearch API. It use the Client Url Library cURL. Released under GPL v3

/**
 * @param $searchTerm
 * @param string $wikipediaServer
 * @return array|string  [text, description, url]
 */
public function getDefinitionFrom
      ($searchTerm, $wikipediaServer = 'http://en.wikipedia.org')
{
    $url = $wikipediaServer. 
              '/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=' .
                urlencode($searchTerm) . '&format=xml&limit=1';
    $ch = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 4);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 
                         "Mozilla/5.0");
    $page = curl_exec($ch);
    $xml = simplexml_load_string($page);
    if ((string)$xml->Section->Item->Description) {
        return array((string)$xml->Section->Item->Text,
                     (string)$xml->Section->Item->Description,
                     (string)$xml->Section->Item->Url);
    
    }
    return "";
}