Get text from a section on some page

Question

I know how to make an API call to get me the text of the whole page, like this, but is there a way (without having to parse through the wiki markup) to only get the text from a certain section?

Answer 1

If you look at the documentation for the revisions module, you'll notice that it has a prameter rvsection, which is exactly what you want. So, for example, to retrieve the lead section, use

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=query&titles=Stack%20Overflow&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&rvsection=0