Get Text Content from mediawiki page via API

Question

I'm quite new to MediaWiki, and now I have a bit of a problem. I have the title of some Wiki page, and I want to get just the text of a said page using api.php, but all that I have found in the API is a way to obtain the Wiki content of the page (with wiki markup). I used this HTTP request...

/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&rvlimit=1&rvprop=content&format=xml&titles=test 

But I need only the textual content, without the Wiki markup. Is that possible with the MediaWiki API?

Answer 1

Use action=parse to get the html:

/api.php?action=parse&page=test

One way to get the text from the html would be to load it into a browser and walk the nodes, looking only for the text nodes, using JavaScript.

Answer 2

The TextExtracts extension of the API does about what you're asking. Use prop=extracts to get a cleaned up response. For example, this link will give you cleaned up text for the Stack Overflow article. What's also nice is that it still includes section tags, so you can identify individual sections of the article.

Just to include a visible link in my answer, the above link looks like:

/api.php?format=xml&action=query&prop=extracts&titles=Stack%20Overflow&redirects=true 

Edit: As Amr mentioned, TextExtracts is an extension to MediaWiki, so it won't necessarily be available for every MediaWiki site.