On This Day

A simple ruby parser for Wikipedia’s “On this day” box on the (english-language) homepage.

Usage

Install the gem

gem install onthisday

Then fetch the current news items

@onthisday = OnThisDay::Parser.new
items = @onthisday.items

Items have text

items.first.text #=> "French Revolution: Meeting on a tennis court near the Palace of Versailles, members of France's Third Estate took the Tennis Court Oath, pledging not to separate until a new constitution was established."

A year

items.first.year #=> 1789

And associated topics (other related wikipedia pages)

items.first.topics #=> ['French_Revolution', 'Palace_of_Versailles', 'Estates_of_the_realm', 'Tennis_Court_Oath', 'Constitution']