Php – How to get link to an image on wikipedia from the infobox

imagesourcePHPwikimedia-commonswikipedia

I'm parsing wikipedia infoboxes and I noticed that some infoboxes have image fields – these fields hold names of image files stashed on wikipedia somewhere. However they just contain the name of the file as is as opposed to the actual link.

I checked the links of the images on real live infoboxes and the links do not seem to be from one source but the sources vary. How can I hyperlink to an image on wikipedia considering I only have the name of the image from an infobox entry.

Best Answer

According to What are the strangely named components in Wikipedia file paths, you need to run md5 to find out url. Now wikipedia allows hotlinking, so:

If you have utf-8 encoded $name, you need to do the following:

$filename = replace($name, ' ', '_');
$digest = md5($filename);
$folder = $digest[0] . '/' . $digest[0] . $digest[1] . '/' .  urlencode($filename);
$url = 'http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/' . $folder;

The same can be used for thumbnails.