Fetch excerpt from Wikipedia article?

Question

I've been up and down the Wikipedia API, but I can't figure out if there's a nice way to fetch the excerpt of an article (usually the first paragraph). It would be nice to get the HTML formatting of that paragraph, too.

The only way I currently see of getting something that resembles a snippet is by performing a fulltext search (example), but that's not really what I want (too short).

Is there any other way to fetch the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article than barbarically parsing HTML/WikiText?

Answer 1

Use this link to get the unparsed intro in xml form "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=query&prop=extracts&exsentences=10&titles=Aati kalenja"

Earlier I could get the introduction of a list of topics/articles from a category in a single page by adding iframes with src like the above link.. But now chrome is throwing this error - "Refused to display document because display forbidden by X-Frame-Options." Any way through? Pls help..