How do I grab just the parsed Infobox of a wikipedia article?

Question

Hi guys, I'm still stuck on my problem of trying to parse articles from wikipedia. Actually I wish to parse the infobox section of articles from wikipedia i.e. my application has references to countries and on each country page I would like to be able to show the infobox which is on corresponding wikipedia article of that country. I'm using php here - I would greatly appreciate it if anyone has any code snippets or advice on what should I be doing here.

Thanks again.

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EDIT

Well I have a db table with names of countries. And I have a script that takes a country and shows its details. I would like to grab the infobox - the blue box with all country details images etc as it is from wikipedia and show it on my page. I would like to know a really simple and easy way to do that - or have a script that just downloads the information of the infobox to a local remote system which I could access myself later on. I mean I'm open to ideas here - except that the end result I want is to see the infobox on my page - of course with a little Content by Wikipedia link at the bottom :)

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EDIT

I think I found what I was looking for on http://infochimps.org - they got loads of datasets in I think the YAML language. I can use this information straight up as it is but I would need a way to constantly update this information from wikipedia now and then although I believe infoboxes rarely change especially o countries unless some nation decides to change their capital city or so.

Answer 1

I suggest performing a WebRequest against wikipedia. From there you will have the page and you can simply parse or query out the data that you need using a regex, character crawl, or some other form that you are familiar with. Essentially a screen scrape!

Answer 2

I suggest you use DBPedia instead which has already done the work of turning the data in wikipedia into usable, linkable, open forms.

Answer 3

It depends what route you want to go. Here are some possibilities:

1. Install MediaWiki with appropriate modifications. It is a after all a PHP app designed precisely to parse wikitext...
2. Download the static HTML version, and parse out the parts you want.
3. Use the Wikipedia API with appropriate caching.

DO NOT just hit the latest version of the live page and redo the parsing every time your app wants the box. This is a huge waste of resources for both you and Wikimedia.

Answer 4

if you want to parse one time all the articles, wikipedia has all the articles in xml format available,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_database

otherwise you can screen scrape individual articles e.g.