mwtemplates

mwtemplates is a MediaWiki wikitext template parser and editor, based on a Python rewrite of the MediaWiki preprocessorDOM.php. Tested with python 2.7, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5

Installation

The package is on PyPI, so you can install it using pip, easy_install or similar:

$ pip install -U mwtemplates

Or you can grab the latest zip from releases.

Introduction

Let's start by importing TemplateEditor and giving it some wikitext to eat:

>>> from mwtemplates import TemplateEditor
>>> txt = u"""{{Infobox cheese
... | name = Mozzarella
... | protein = 7
... }}
... Mozzarella is a cheese…{{tr}}"""
>>> te = TemplateEditor(txt)

First, we can see what templates the editor found in the text:

>>> te.templates
[<Template:"Infobox cheese" at line 2>, <Template:"Tr" at line 6>]

Each template is an instance of a Template class. Also notice that template names are normalized by upper-casing the first character. Now, we can try investigating the Infobox cheese template:

>>> te.templates['Infobox cheese']
[<Template:"Infobox cheese" at line 2>]

Since there can be several instances of the same template, an array is always returned, and so we need to ask for te.templates['Infobox cheese'][0] to get the actual Template. To get the parameters:

>>> te.templates['Infobox cheese'][0].parameters
<Parameters: name="Mozzarella", protein="10">

Let's say we want to change the value of the protein parameter from 10 to 7. We then use the wikitext() method to return our new wikitext:

>>> te.templates['Infobox cheese'][0].parameters['protein'] = 7
>>> print te.wikitext()
{{Infobox cheese
| name = Mozzarella
| protein = 10
}}
Mozzarella is a cheese…{{tr}}

Notice that formatting is preserved. We could now go and add a new parameter like so:

>>> te.templates['Infobox cheese'][0].parameters['fat'] = 25
>>> print te.wikitext()
{{Infobox cheese
| name = Mozzarella
| protein = 7
| fat = 25
}}
Mozzarella is a cheese…{{tr}}

To remove a template argument:

from mwtemplates import TemplateEditor
te = TemplateEditor(u"Hello {{mytpl | a=2 | b=3 | c=4 }} world")
te.templates['mytpl'].parameters.remove('b')

To remove the first instance of a template:

from mwtemplates import TemplateEditor
te = TemplateEditor(u"Hello {{mytpl}} world {{mytpl}}")
te.templates['mytpl'][0].remove()

Known issues

The parser doesn't handle empty <nowiki/> tags. It will raise a mwtemplates.NowikiError error if feeded a page having one, so it's a good idea to handle those:

>>> from mwtemplates import TemplateEditor, NowikiError
>>> try:
>>>     te = TemplateEditor(txt)
>>> except NowikiError:
>>>     print('Page contains <nowiki/> tags, skipping.')

Usage with mwclient to edit pages on Wikipedia

Updating a page on Wikipedia using mwclient

from mwclient import Site
from mwtemplates import TemplateEditor

site = Site('en.wikipedia.org')
site.login('USERNAME', 'PASSWORD')
page = site.pages['SOME_PAGE']
te = TemplateEditor(page.text())
if 'SOME_TEMPLATE' in page.templates:
   tpl = te.templates['SOME_TEMPLATE'][0]
   tpl.parameters['test'] = 'Hello'
page.save(te.wikitext(), summary='...')

Contributing

Pull requests are very welcome. Please run tests before submitting: