Part 4/10:
Parsing Wikipedia XML: The enormous export file (~17 million lines) is read line-by-line, identifying
<page>tags, titles, IDs, and text content. This method conserves memory and maintains efficiency.Extracting Article Content: Once detected, each article’s raw markup is extracted and processed. The script filters out non-encyclopedic pages like talk pages or categories identified by colons in titles.
Cleaning Up the Text: Through regex-based scripts, the markup is stripped away. The cleaning removes:
External links and internal links (e.g.,
[[Link]])Citations and references
Media files and image links
Tables, which are complex and less straightforward to represent in plain text
Extra whitespace, new lines, and HTML entities