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 in system messages, and on approximately 18,900,000 pages, or roughly 29% of all pages.
Changes to it can cause immediate changes to the Wikipedia user interface.
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. Please discuss changes on the talk page before implementing them.

This module is rated as ready for general use. It has reached a mature state, is considered relatively stable and bug-free, and may be used wherever appropriate. It can be mentioned on help pages and other Wikipedia resources as an option for new users. To minimise server load and avoid disruptive output, improvements should be developed through sandbox testing rather than repeated trial-and-error editing.

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

This module provides functions to help with the complex edge cases involved in modules like Module:Template parameter value which intend to process the raw wikitext of a page while respecting nowiki tags or similar content reliably. This module is designed to be called by other modules, and does not support invoking.

PrepareText

PrepareText(text, keepComments) will run any content within certain tags that normally disable processing (<nowiki>, <pre>, <syntaxhighlight>, <source>, <math>) through mw.text.nowiki and remove HTML comments. This allows for tricky syntax to be parsed through more basic means such as %b{} by other modules without worrying about edge cases.

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 noting.