New subject: [Pywikipedia-l] Oversimplification of pywikipediabot - intended or work in progress?

3 Sep 2013

Hello,

I'm trying to convert a fairly large set of scripts from compat to
core and I found a significant loss of functionality in getting image
and template info. While writing this, I've noticed that the latest
version of core also has some of these prblems. I will elaborate on
this loss of functionality below, but I would like to know if this
simplification is intended or if this is part of some work in
progress.

For the image parsing, the function linkedPages(withImageLinks = True)
used to provide images that were not included through templates, while
imageLinks would provide all the images. In core, the linkedPages
function no longer provides this capability, and I haven't found any
replacement (I ported the old function in my code)

For template parsing, templatesWithParams from class Page used to
provide a pair containing the template name and a list of parameters,
with the full "key=value" string. Nowadays, we're getting a dictionary
instead of that list. Normally there is nothing wrong with that,
except that in Python 2 the dictionary is unordered, which means that:
* the order of the parameters is forever lost
* the original text cannot be reconstructed (because of the above and
the missing whitespace information) - this means there is no easy way
to identify and/or replace a particular instance of the template in a
page with many identical templates. It used to be you could do it with
simple find/replace operations, now it takes some more work.

I personally would like to have the old behavior back, it would save
me and probably others a lot of work.

Thanks,
  Strainu