User:Ch4zm/Pywikibot

Notes

20211004

Questions about Pywikibot:

• Digging into the example, there's this textlib.extract_sections, but it's not documented as part of the API. What gives?
• Once you extract a document into its corresponding sections, you can pick out a specific section. But what then?
• You can't (apparently) modify the Section object.
• You can't create your own Section, because it's a private object, not documented, not part of public API.
• So, we end up looping over each section, and finding section.title + section.content unless it's the section we want.
• This seems really idiotic, but there's no documentation of any of these functions or objects, sooooo what the fuck am I supposed to do?
• I'm getting stuck on the very first non-trivial task I have, the very first non-trivial article I'm editing.
• All kinds of mysterious stuff going on in the pywikibot library that isn't documented. WTF??
• Another example, how to connect the objects to a given page? Like, I can extract Category objects that tell me about categories on a page, but how do I update a section that may contain Categories, and preserve the Category links and only the category links? or the templates?
• Why is this so difficult?

Solution to make this all simpler:

• pywikibot is limited, capabilities-wise, by its crummy incomplete barely-sufficient documentation.
• we have to do what we have to do, make it work using whatever capabilities it does have. work around that.
• meaning, if we expect Records pages to be automatically updated, then structure them so it makes it really easy to parse the page.

Category:Records