Wikipedia information from the command line

wiki.php

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
    /*
     * A program to grab a quick summary of some topic from Wikipedia.
     * Usage: wiki <subject>
     *
     * subject can contain spaces if, for example, it is more than one word.
     * Examples
     * `wiki cherry bomb`
     * `wiki Hercules`
     *
     * Douglas Lenz 2015
     *
     */

    // Verify the correct number of command line args have been given
    $num_args = count($argv) - 1;
    if($num_args == 0) {
        echo "Usage: wiki <subject>\n";
        exit(0);
    }

    // Get the command line args that constitute the search term
    $args = [];
    for($i=0; $i < $num_args; $i++) {
        $args[] = $argv[$i+1];
    }

    // Where there are spaces, instead use _
    $search_term = join("_", $args);

    // Set up curl options
    $curl = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?continue=&action=query&titles=$search_term&prop=extracts&exintro=&explaintext=&format=json&redirects");
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "WikiTerm/1.0");
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    // Run and close curl
    $result = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);

    // Parse the JSON response and locate the data we want
    $data = json_decode($result, true);
    $subdata = $data['query']['pages'];
    $subsubdata = $subdata[array_keys($subdata)[0]];

    // Display to screen
    if(array_key_exists('missing', $subsubdata)) {
        echo "No articles found.";
    } else {
        echo "\n" . $subsubdata['title'] . "\n\n";
	exec("fold -s -w 80 <<EOF\n" . escapeshellarg($subsubdata['extract']) . "\nEOF", $lines, $_);
	foreach($lines as $line) {
	    echo $line . "\n";
	}
        //echo $subsubdata['extract'];
    }
    echo "\n";

    exit(0);

?>

Ah, I see. Sorry about the confusion and the resulting rant! Reading my comment again I guess I was a bit frustrated for no real reason when writing it, sorry about that.

In this particular case I do think PHP is the wrong tool for the job though, as PHP is designed specifically for making webpages and not much else, but I respect that some may disagree with that. If you have php and php-curl already installed it doesn't matter though, the different scripts posted all accomplish the exact same thing :)

Good solution with wordwrap, hopefully it will be included in op's script soon for anyone else downloading it in the future.