Get the first link in a Wikipedia article not inside parentheses
So I'm interested in this theory that if you go to a random Wikipedia article, click the first link not inside parentheses repeatedly, in 95% of the cases you will end up on the article about Philosophy.
I wanted to write a script in Python that does the link fetching for me and in the end, print a nice list of which articles were visited ( linkA -> linkB -> linkC ) etc.
I managed to get the HTML DOM of the web pages, and managed to strip out some unnecessary links and the top description bar which leads disambiguation pages. So far I have concluded that:
<p> element somewhere as their ancestor (most often parent or grandparent if it's inside a <b> tag or similar. The top bar which leads to disambiguation pages, does not seem to contain any <p> elements. Wikipedia: So far, so good. But it's the parentheses that get me. In the article about Human for example, the first link not inside parentheses is "/wiki/Species", but the script finds "/wiki/Taxonomy" which is inside them.
I have no idea how to go about this programmatically, since I have to look for text in some combination of parent/child nodes which may not always be the same. Any ideas?
My code can be seen below, but it's something I made up really quickly and not very proud of. It's commented however, so you can see my line of thoughts (I hope :) ).
"""Wikipedia fun"""
import urllib2
from xml.dom.minidom import parseString
import time
def validWikiArticleLinkString(href):
""" Takes a string and returns True if it contains the substring
'/wiki/' in the beginning and does not contain any of the
"special" wiki pages.
"""
return (href.find("/wiki/") == 0
and href.find("(disambiguation)") == -1
and href.find("File:") == -1
and href.find("Wikipedia:") == -1
and href.find("Portal:") == -1
and href.find("Special:") == -1
and href.find("Help:") == -1
and href.find("Template_talk:") == -1
and href.find("Template:") == -1
and href.find("Talk:") == -1
and href.find("Category:") == -1
and href.find("Bibcode") == -1
and href.find("Main_Page") == -1)
if __name__ == "__main__":
visited = [] # a list of visited links. used to avoid getting into loops
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')] # need headers for the api
currentPage = "Human" # the page to start with
while True:
infile = opener.open('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%s&printable=yes' % currentPage)
html = infile.read() # retrieve the contents of the wiki page we are at
htmlDOM = parseString(html) # get the DOM of the parsed HTML
aTags = htmlDOM.getElementsByTagName("a") # find all <a> tags
for tag in aTags:
if "href" in tag.attributes.keys(): # see if we have the href attribute in the tag
href = tag.attributes["href"].value # get the value of the href attribute
if validWikiArticleLinkString(href): # if we have one of the link types we are looking for
# Now come the tricky parts. We want to look for links in the main content area only,
# and we want the first link not in parentheses.
# assume the link is valid.
invalid = False
# tables which appear to the right on the site appear first in the DOM, so we need to make sure
# we are not looking at a <a> tag somewhere inside a <table>.
pn = tag.parentNode
while pn is not None:
if str(pn).find("table at") >= 0:
invalid = True
break
else:
pn = pn.parentNode
if invalid: # go to next link
continue
# Next we look at the descriptive texts above the article, if any; e.g
# This article is about .... or For other uses, see ... (disambiguation).
# These kinds of links will lead into loops so we classify them as invalid.
# We notice that this text does not appear to be inside a <p> block, so
# we dismiss <a> tags which aren't inside any <p>.
pnode = tag.parentNode
while pnode is not None:
if str(pnode).find("p at") >= 0:
break
pnode = pnode.parentNode
# If we have reached the root node, which has parentNode None, we classify the
# link as invalid.
if pnode is None:
invalid = True
if invalid:
continue
###### this is where I got stuck:
# now we need to look if the link is inside parentheses. below is some junk
# for elem in tag.parentNode.childNodes:
# while elem.firstChild is not None:
# elem = elem.firstChid
# print elem.nodeValue
print href # this will be the next link
newLink = href[6:] # except for the /wiki/ part
break
# if we have been to this link before, break the loop
if newLink in visited:
print "Stuck in loop."
break
# or if we have reached Philosophy
elif newLink == "Philosophy":
print "Ended up in Philosophy."
break
else:
visited.append(currentPage) # mark this currentPage as visited
currentPage = newLink # make the the currentPage we found the new page to fetch
time.sleep(5) # sleep some to see results as debug
I found a python script on Github (http://github.com/JensTimmerman/scripts/blob/master/philosophy.py) to play this game. It uses Beautifulsoup for HTML parsing and to cope with the parantheses issue he just removes text between brackets before parsing links.
链接地址: http://www.djcxy.com/p/10772.html