Last Updated: May 11, 2020
·
2.145K
· blazeeboy

Ask wikipedia from command line using Ruby

this could be a complementary script for your rails application, if you have a rails blog and want to give the user ability to search in wikipedia within the same window, or if you want to crawl wikipedia and extract the text only, the following is a simple straightforward solution.

require 'open-uri'
require 'json'

language = 'en'

print 'What do you need to know? : '
article = URI::encode gets.chomp

request_url = "http://#{language}.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=#{article}&format=json&prop=text&section=0"

open(request_url) do |file|
  content = JSON.parse(file.read())['parse']['text'].first[1]
  content_text = content.gsub(/<\/?[^>]+>/, '')
  content_text = content_text.gsub(/[[:space:]]+/, ' ')
  content_text = content_text.gsub(/&#[0-9]+;/,'')
  content_text = content_text.gsub(/\[[0-9]+\]/,'')
  puts content_text
end

as this protip got so many views and comments more than any other protip i wrote, i decided to make it as gem
you can find it here : https://github.com/blazeeboy/askwiki

5 Responses
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Cool

over 1 year ago ·

Access wikipedia via DNS query:

user@server:~$ dig +short txt tron.wp.dg.cx
"Tron is a 1982 American science fiction film written and directed by Steven Lisberger and released by Buena Vista Distribution. It stars Jeff Bridges as the protagonist, Bruce Boxleitner in a dual role, and David Warner, who plays all three main antagonis" "ts. A computer programmer is transported inside the software world of a mainframe computer, where he interacts with various... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron"

Source: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/2829/query-wikipedia-via-console-over-dns

over 1 year ago ·

Woooooow this amazing

over 1 year ago ·

This is awesome. Great post.

over 1 year ago ·

Really useful Thanks

over 1 year ago ·