wikitextparser 0.17.1

A simple, purely python, WikiText parsing tool.

WikiTextParser

A simple to use WikiText parsing library for MediaWiki.

The purpose is to allow users easily extract and/or manipulate templates, template parameters, parser functions, tables, external links, wikilinks, lists, etc. found in wikitexts.

WikiTextParser currently only supports Python 3.3+

Installation

pip install wikitextparser

Usage

Here is a short demo of some of the functionalities:

>>> import wikitextparser as wtp

WikiTextParser can detect sections, parserfunctions, templates, wikilinks, external links, arguments, tables, wiki-lists, and HTML comments in your wikitext:

>>> wt = wtp.parse("""
== h2 ==
t2

=== h3 ===
t3

== h22 ==
t22

{{text|value1{{text|value2}}}}

[[A|B]]""")
>>>
>>> wt.templates
[Template('{{text|value2}}'), Template('{{text|value1{{text|value2}}}}')]
>>> wt.templates[1].arguments
[Argument("|value1{{text|value2}}")]
>>> wt.templates[1].arguments[0].value = 'value3'
>>> print(wt)

== h2 ==
t2

=== h3 ===
t3

== h22 ==
t22

{{text|value3}}

[[A|B]]

It provides easy-to-use properties so you can get or set names or values of templates, arguments, wikilinks, etc.:

>>> wt.wikilinks
[WikiLink("[[A|B]]")]
>>> wt.wikilinks[0].target = 'Z'
>>> wt.wikilinks[0].text = 'X'
>>> wt.wikilinks[0]
WikiLink('[[Z|X]]')
>>>
>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> pprint(wt.sections)
[Section('\n'),
 Section('== h2 ==\nt2\n\n=== h3 ===\nt3\n\n'),
 Section('=== h3 ===\nt3\n\n'),
 Section('== h22 ==\nt22\n\n{{text|value3}}\n\n[[Z|X]]')]
>>>
>>> wt.sections[1].title = 'newtitle'
>>> print(wt)

==newtitle==
t2

=== h3 ===
t3

== h22 ==
t22

{{text|value3}}

[[Z|X]]

The pformat method returns a pretty-print formatted string for templates:

>>> p = wtp.parse('{{t1 |b=b|c=c| d={{t2|e=e|f=f}} }}')
>>> t2, t1 = p.templates
>>> print(t2.pformat())
{{t2
    | e = e
    | f = f
}}
>>> print(t1.pformat())
{{t1
    | b = b
    | c = c
    | d = {{t2
        | e = e
        | f = f
    }}
}}

If you are dealing with [[Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls]] there are two functions that may be helpful:

>>> t = wtp.Template('{{t|a=a|a=b|a=a}}')
>>> t.rm_dup_args_safe()
>>> t
Template('{{t|a=b|a=a}}')
>>> t = wtp.Template('{{t|a=a|a=b|a=a}}')
>>> t.rm_first_of_dup_args()
>>> t
Template('{{t|a=a}}')

Extracting cell values of a table is easy:

>>> p = wtp.parse("""{|
|  Orange    ||   Apple   ||   more
|-
|   Bread    ||   Pie     ||   more
|-
|   Butter   || Ice cream ||  and more
|}""")
>>> pprint(p.tables[0].data())
[['Orange', 'Apple', 'more'],
 ['Bread', 'Pie', 'more'],
 ['Butter', 'Ice cream', 'and more']]

And values are rearranged according to colspan and rowspan attributes (by default):

>>> t = wtp.Table("""{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! a !! b !! c
|-
!colspan = "2" | d || e
|-
|}""")
>>> t.data(span=True)
[['a', 'b', 'c'], ['d', 'd', 'e']]

By calling the cells method of a Table, you can access table cells as Cell objects which provide methods for getting or setting each cell’s attributes and values individually.

>>> cell = t.cells(row=1, column=1)
>>> cell.attrs
{'colspan': '2'}
>>> cell.set('colspan', '3')
>>> print(t.string)
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! a !! b !! c
|-
!colspan = "3" | d || e
|-
|}

Access HTML attributes of Tag, Table, and Cell instances using get_attr, set_attr, has_attr, and del_atrr methods.

The lists method provides access to lists within the wikitext.

>>> parsed = wtp.parse(
    'text\n'
    '* list item a\n'
    '* list item b\n'
    '** sub-list of b\n'
    '* list item c\n'
    '** sub-list of b\n'
    'text'
)
>>> wikilist = parsed.lists()[0]
>>> wikilist.items
[' list item a', ' list item b', ' list item c']

The sublists method can be used to get all sublists of the current list or just sublists of specific items:

>>> wikilist.sublists()
[WikiList('** sub-list of b\n'), WikiList('** sub-list of b\n')]
>>> wikilist.sublists(1)[0].items
[' sub-list of b']

It also has an optional pattern argument that works similar to lists, except that the current list pattern will be automatically added to it as a prefix:

>>> wikilist = wtp.WikiList('#a\n#b\n##ba\n#*bb\n#:bc\n#c', '\#')
>>> wikilist.sublists()
[WikiList('##ba\n'), WikiList('#*bb\n'), WikiList('#:bc\n')]
>>> wikilist.sublists(pattern='\*')
[WikiList('#*bb\n')]

Convert one type of list to another using the convert method. Specifying the starting pattern of the desired lists can facilitate finding them and improves the performance:

>>> wl = wtp.WikiList(
    ':*A1\n:*#B1\n:*#B2\n:*:continuing A1\n:*A2',
    pattern=':\*'
)
>>> print(wl)
:*A1
:*#B1
:*#B2
:*:continuing A1
:*A2
>>> wl.convert('#')
>>> print(wl)
#A1
##B1
##B2
#:continuing A1
#A2

Accessing HTML tags:

>>> p = wtp.parse('text<ref name="c">citation</ref>\n<references/>')
>>> ref, references = p.tags()
>>> ref.name = 'X'
>>> ref
Tag('<X name="c">citation</X>')
>>> references
Tag('<references/>')

As illustrated above WikiTextParser is able to handle common usages of HTML and extension tags. However be aware that WikiTextParser is not a fully-fledged HTML parser, don’t expect it to handle edge cases or malformed HTML input exactly as your browser does. If you encounter any bugs, please open an issue on github.

You may want to have a look at the test modules for more examples and probable pitfalls.

Compared with mwparserfromhell

mwparserfromhell is a mature and widely used library with nearly the same purposes as wikitextparser. The main reason leading me to create wikitextparser was that mwparserfromhell could not parse wikitext in certain situations that I needed it for. See mwparserfromhell’s issues 40, 42, 88, and other related issues. In many of those situation wikitextparser may be able to give you more acceptable results.

But if you need to

• use Python 2

• parse style tags like ‘’’bold’’’ and ‘’italics’’ (with some limitations of-course)

• extract HTML entities

then mwparserfromhell or maybe other libraries will be the way to go. Also note that wikitextparser is still under heavy development and the API may change drastically in the future versions.

Of-course wikitextparser has its own unique features, too: Providing access to individual cells of each table, pretty-printing templates, and a few other advanced functions.

I have not rigorously compared the two libraries in terms of performance, i.e. execution time and memory usage, but in my limited experience, wikitextparser has a decent performance even though some critical parts of mwparserfromhell (the tokenizer) are written in C. wikitextparser should able to compete and may even have little performance benefits in many situations. However if you are working with on-line data, any difference is usually negligible as the main bottleneck will be the network latency.

If you have had a chance to compare these libraries in terms of performance please share your experience by opening an issue on github.