NAME
    WWW::Wikipedia - Automated interface to the Wikipedia

SYNOPSIS
      use WWW::Wikipedia;
      my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new();

      ## search for 'perl' 
      my $result = $wiki->search( 'perl' );

      ## if the entry has some text print it out
      if ( $result->text() ) { 
          print $result->text();
      }

      ## list any related items we can look up 
      print join( "\n", $result->related() );

DESCRIPTION
    WWW::Wikipedia provides an automated interface to the Wikipedia
    <http://www.wikipedia.org>, which is a free, collaborative, online
    encyclopedia. This module allows you to search for a topic and return
    the resulting entry. It also gives you access to related topics which
    are also available via the Wikipedia for that entry.

INSTALLATION
    To install this module type the following:

        perl Makefile.PL
        make
        make test
        make install

METHODS
  new()
    The constructor. You can pass it a two letter language code, or nothing
    to let it default to 'en'.

        ## Default: English
        my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new();

        ## use the French wiki instead
        my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new( language => 'fr' );

    WWW::Wikipedia is a subclass of LWP::UserAgent. If you would like to
    have more control over the user agent (control timeouts, proxies ...)
    you have full access.

        ## set HTTP request timeout
        my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new();
        $wiki->timeout( 2 );

    You can turn off the following of wikipedia redirect directives by
    passing a false value to "follow_redirects".

    Together with the Wiki markup, some entries include HTML tags. They can
    be stripped out using the "clean_html" option:

       my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new( clean_html => 1 );

    See "clean_html" documentation bellow for details.

  language()
    This allows you to get and set the language you want to use. Two letter
    language codes should be used. The default is 'en'.

        my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new( language => 'es' );
    
        # Later on...
        $wiki->language( 'fr' );

  clean_html()
    Allows to get/set if HTML is being stripped out.

        # set HTML strip
        $wiki->clean_html( 1 );

    This option removes all tags and attributes they might have. Their
    contents, however, is maintained (for now). Comments are also removed.

  follow_redirects()
    By default, wikipeda redirect directives are followed. Set this to false
    to turn that off.

  search()
    Which performs the search and returns a WWW::Wikipedia::Entry object
    which you can query further. See WWW::Wikipedia::Entry docs for more
    info.

        $entry = $wiki->search( 'Perl' );
        print $entry->text();

    If there's a problem connecting to Wikipedia, "undef" will be returned
    and the error message will be stored in "error()".

  random()
    This method fetches a random wikipedia page.

  error()
    This is a generic error accessor/mutator. You can retrieve any searching
    error messages here.

TODO
    *   Be more specific on the HTML clean methodology. For now all tags are
        removed, keeping only their contents. In the future the behaviour
        might change accordingly with each specific tag.

    *   Watch the development of Special:Export XML formatting, eg:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export/perl

SEE ALSO
    *   LWP::UserAgent

REPOSITORY
    <https://github.com/edsu/www-wikipedia>

AUTHORS
    Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com>

    Brian Cassidy <bricas@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
    Copyright 2003-2015 by Ed Summers

    This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
    under the same terms as Perl itself.

