Getting version number of latest WordPress release

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I want to find out the latest version of WordPress that is officially released. If possible, I’d like to get that version language specific for at least English and German.

I could try and parse the website https://wordpress.org/download/ but it doesn’t have the version number in a specific place. I also know I could download the latest package (https://wordpress.org/latest.zip), but I don’t need the whole package, just the version number.

Is there a reliable, stable way to just get the latest stable version number of WordPress?

This question is not about getting the version number of my WordPress installation. Actually I want to compare my installed version against the latest version by a script.

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WordPress.org offers an api that includes a version checker. That version checker can return a json response (or a serialized string if that’s your thing).

Example usage

$url="https://api.wordpress.org/core/version-check/1.7/";
$response = wp_remote_get($url);

$json = $response['body'];
$obj = json_decode($json);

The resulting $obj will contain an offers array, whose first element is an object that contains the information you want.

$upgrade = $obj->offers[0];
echo $upgrade->version;

$upgrade will also contain a lot of other useful information including the locale, where to download the current version, etc.

If you’re going to be running this in a plugin, I’d recommend caching it with a transient that expires every 12 hours or something and not spamming the poor api on every page load.

Edit: Variable name spelling fail.

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