| Removing a pipe at end of line in infobox | ||
|---|---|---|
| Creator: | CzechOut | |
| What it does: | Removes stray pipes at end of a line in an infobox | |
| Complexity: | moderate | |
Removing a pipe at end of line in infobox is a bit of regex that will help you remove pipes (|) that may be at the end of a line.
Let's say that you had a prolific editor who was working with templates she had created offline. But she added a stray pipe at the end of a line, like so:
|name = Sam Smith | |age = 34 |sex = unspecified
And because she's replicated this error hundreds of times across the site, it'll be a pain to manually remove this single pipe. This little bit of code searches out the precise line ending in a pipe and removes it.
It is typically used with the replace.py script.
Code[]
python pwb.py replace.py -regex -pt:1 -summary:"INFOBOX CLEANUP: Getting rid of appending pipe in an infobox line" '\|( *)\r' '\1' -start:!
Explanation[]
This regex matches lines that end with a pipe, an optional amount of spaces from 0 to infinity, and a carriage return. It then replaces the match of everything it's found with just the number of spaces it's found.
- \| means find a pipe (the slash escapes the pipe, letting the bot know we're looking for a literal pipe)
- ( *) means find any number of spaces, if they even exist
- \r means find a carriage return
Known limitations[]
This situation can also occur in tables that are set up using wikitext. Depending on how many tables are found on your wiki, this could be a problem.
For this reason it is recommended that you do not run this in automatic mode.
Why bother?[]
You may well wonder why we should even bother getting rid of the stray pipe. After all, a stray pipe in this situation is essentially harmless — the infobox will still display properly if it encounters an extraneous pipe.
But it can be detrimental to other bot runs ago encounter a pipe in an unexpected location nd probably should be eliminated as a matter of "good grooming".