On Feb 5, 2014 8:38 AM, "Zachary Harris" <zacharyharris(a)hotmail.com>
wrote:
>
> 1) Is there a way to tell the Parser that you don't want the initial DOM
> element wrapped in paragraph tags? (For example, if you are client-side
> injecting the mw-api contents into already existing content and you
> don't want a paragraph break there?) It seems this same question was
> effectively asked at
>
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API_talk:Parsing_wikitext and hasn't been
> answered yet.
> If the parser can't be configured in this way and I have to strip
> possibly undesired openings tags myself do I have any guarantees on what
> to expect?
Not really. Even innternally in core (in OutputPage and in Message class)
we regex out the <p> when its not wanted. (Icky!)
>
> 2) Why do JSON results come back, for example, in the form of
> parse.text['*'] rather than just parse.text? With format=XML the result
> is just <parse><text>the stuff</text></parse>. Why the
"*"? Sorry if
> this question is dumb.
>
From what i've heard, historical reasons mostly. I
believe its so that the
xml can be mechanically turned into json - the text body of
an element is
treated like an attribute * so that if that element had attributes they
could also be represented.
-bawolff