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

Answer 1

I found no way of doing this through the API, so I resorted to parsing HTML, using PHP's DOM functions. This was pretty easy, something among the lines of:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($wikiPage);
$xpath = new DOMXpath($doc);
$nlPNodes = $xpath->query('//div[@id="bodyContent"]/p');
$nFirstP = $nlPNodes->item(0);
$sFirstP = $doc->saveXML($nFirstP);
echo $sFirstP; // echo the first paragraph of the wiki article, including