title: Scraping and Parsing a Wikipedia Page
body: <p>I'm wondering if there are any existing libraries in or accessible from Objective-C that would allow me to scrape pages formatted like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_27" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this one</a>. Specifically, all of the dates and all of the text next to each date. If not, what would be the best way to go about doing this? Regular expressions? I heard that <code>NSString</code> might already have built-in methods for this. Is this true?</p>
  
  <p>I was looking around to see if there were any alternative to scraping, such as an XML file or API. I did find an API but the only clients I see available are in other languages and they seem to just be able to post content to pages, not retrieve it.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>: So I found more information regarding the API at these links:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MediaWiki API</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Query" rel="nofollow noreferrer">API:Query</a></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>And I was able to come up with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&amp;page=October_27" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this request</a> which returns some HTML encoded text (Well the format is XML, but it includes the page's text such as <code>&amp;raquo;a href=</code> etc. I'll keep looking through the docs to see if I can make this come out a bit better, if not though, are there any recommendations on parsing this?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT 2</strong>: Alright so thanks to <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Parameters_to_index.php#Raw" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this doc page</a>, the simplest and cleanest way I've been able to retrieve the data is using this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=October_27&amp;action=raw&amp;section=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">constructed link</a> which returns the raw data (<em>In wiki markup</em>) of the relevant section. However, I guess I would then need to parse that, though if that really is the case, it should be a lot easier than the entire article.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone have any recommendations on parsing wiki markup such as the following in Objective-C?</p>
  
  <pre><code>==Events==
  * [[710]] &amp;ndash; [[Saracen]] invasion of [[Sardinia]].
  *[[1275]] &amp;ndash; Traditional founding of the city of [[Amsterdam]].
  *[[1682]] &amp;ndash; [[Philadelphia]], [[Pennsylvania]] is founded.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What I want to end up having is, I guess an <code>NSDictionary</code> or similar collection that will store the date with the accompanying snippet of information. Thanks!</p>