How to get Wikipedia “clean” content?

Question

I'm using Mediawiki api in order to get content from Wikipedia pages. I've written a code which generates the next query (for example):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&rvsection=0&titles=hawaii

Which retrieves only the leading paragraph from the Wikipdia page about Hawaii.

The problem is that as you might notice there are a lot of irrelevant substrings such as:

"[[Molokai|Moloka{{okina}}i]], [[Lanai|Lāna{{okina}}i]], [[Kahoolawe|Kaho{{okina}}olawe]], [[Maui]] and the [[Hawaii (island)|" .

All those barckets [[]] are not relevant , and I wonder whether there is an alegant method to pull only 'clean' content from such pages?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can get a clean HTML text from Wikipedia with this query:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&titles=hawaii

If you want just a plain text, without HTML, try this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&titles=hawaii&explaintext

Answer 2

please try this:

$relevant = preg_replace('/[[.*?]]/', '', $string);

EDIT: just found this - hope it is helpful