bgapinski / wikipedia-query Goto Github PK

A simple command line tool that provides basic information (provided by Wikipedia) on a user supplied topic.

You can use sbt to run the program. It will automatically install the dependencies.

There are two ways to make queries:

• Enter sbt run and you will be prompted for a topic.
• Pass a command line argument into the program using something of the form sbt "run <topic>"

The program is straight forward. It either reads the topic from the command line or prompts the user if there is none. It then attempts to connect to the relevant Wikipedia page. If it fails to connect or encounters any other error in the process, it will return "Not found.". Otherwise it will parse the response to get the first paragraph from Wikipedia. We make use of the fact that the main content of Wikipedia articles are wrapped in a div with the id 'mw-content-text'.

This project makes use of jsoup, an html parsing library. It is a well documented, straight forward library that addresses the tasks I needed (getting the contents of a webpage and pulling out the first paragraph). This project also makes use of Scala's Try library to handle any exception we might get when connecting to a page (such as a 404, 503, etc).