Module:Wikitext Parsing/doc

This is a documentation subpage for Module:Wikitext Parsing.
It may contain usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original module page.

This Lua module is used on approximately 17,200,000 pages, or roughly 28% of all pages.
To avoid major disruption and server load, any changes should be tested in the module's /sandbox or /testcases subpages, or in your own module sandbox. The tested changes can be added to this page in a single edit. Consider discussing changes on the talk page before implementing them.

This module can only be edited by administrators because it is transcluded onto one or more cascade-protected pages.

This module provides some functions to help with the potential complex situation involved in modules like Module:Template parameter value, which intend to process the raw wikitext of a page and want to respect nowiki tags or similar reliably. This module is designed only to be called by other modules.

PrepareText

PrepareText(text, keepComments) will run any content within certain tags that disable processing (<nowiki>, <pre>, <syntaxhighlight>, <source>, <math>) through mw.text.nowiki and remove HTML comments to avoid irrelevant text being processed by modules, allowing tricky syntax to be parsed through more basic means such as %b{}.

If the second parameter, keepComments, is set to true, the content of HTML comments will be passed through mw.text.nowiki instead of being removed entirely.

Any code using this function directly should consider using mw.text.decode to correct the output at the end if part of the processed text is returned, though this will also decode any input that was encoded but not inside a no-processing tag, which likely isn't a significant issue but still something worth considering.

ParseTemplates

ParseTemplates(InputText, dontEscape) will attempt to parse all {{Templates}} on a page, handling multiple factors such as [[Wikilinks]] and {{{Variables}}} among other complex syntax. Due to the complexity of the function, it is considerably slow, and should be used carefully. The function returns a list of template objects in order of appearance, which have the following properties:

Args: A key-value set of arguments, not in order
ArgOrder: A list of keys in the order they appear in the template
Children: A list of template objects that are contained within the existing template, in order of appearance. Only immediate children are listed
Name: The name of the template
Text: The raw text of the template

If the second parameter, dontEscape, is set to true, the inputted text won't be ran through the PrepareText function.