Module talk:String2

One2a with fractions

When I try and use the One2a wrapper with convert on a faction such as {{one2a|{{convert|1/2|acre|spell=in}}}} it produces "a-half acre (0.20 ha)" with a hyphen, which isn't grammatically correct. Is there a way to change this to be a space? Thanks, --Voello _talk 13:55, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

There is no good support for all variations like that. The simplest would be to give up and use:

• a half acre ({{convert|1/2|acre|disp=out}}) → a half acre (0.20 ha)

Johnuniq (talk) 23:27, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Fix ucfirst when using × or 32nd

Currently ucfirst fails if you try to use it on for example 32nd or using html entites such as ×. Please update module with code from sandbox that fixes this. All ucfirst-testcases should be green afterwards. Tholme (talk) 15:31, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

 Done Looks good to me – thanks! User:GKFX^talk 12:04, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Redirects in findpagetext

If a page gets renamed, findpagetext no longer finds the text, and feels kinda lost. Can it be made to follow redirects (either using module:redirect or by itself)? — Guarapiranga ☎ 03:22, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

ucfirst()

Re: this discussion (permalink) at Wikipedia:Help desk.

I have tweaked ucfirst() in Module:String2/sandbox to account for that case. I have tweaked Module:String2/testcases to show that I didn't break anything and to show that the ~/sandbox version correctly renders the string of wikilinks where the piped link is not the first link.

Comments desired. Without anyone comments, I shall update the live module from the sandbox.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:07, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Good. See my edit at Module:String2/sandbox for a trivial issue. My head is not quite up to parsing the regexes at the moment but surely if first_text exists, that means it is not piped and you don't need to check for that? I think that's what is happening? Several of the mw.ustring could be plain string (faster) but that might be a bit tricky for subsequent editors. I suspect finding the start and end of the lowercase letter and replacing it with sub would be more efficient than gsub but I'm not up to that... Johnuniq (talk) 01:02, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the fix. Everything I write from scratch and everything that I maintain has require ('strict'). I forget that other modules don't always use that. I've added it to this sandbox.

The code doesn't actually check for unpiped links but does check to see if the link we found is a piped link – we want to upcase the piped link's display text, not the piped link's link text. If not a piped link, we fall into the code that upcases the unpiped link's link text.

mw.ustring.<whatever>() because unicode characters are allowed as article titles. I can imagine non-English redirect links for example.

You may be right with regard to mw.ustring.sub() vs mw.ustring.gsub() but I have never really liked mw.ustring.sub() because to me, it is more cryptic than patterns. I don't suppose it really matters that much because I suspect that ucfirst() isn't used all that often.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 02:00, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Oh. I had a look at what aroused my suspicion and see that I was imagining the "extract" regex at line 26 included a pipe in the "not these characters" part so it only found an unpiped link. A hallucination from non-artificial intelligence. Johnuniq (talk) 04:51, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

In the time since my last post, I have hacked some more on ~/sandbox. I did that because it seemed odd to me that ucfirst() had specific code to handle <li> but no other tags. Why just that tag? So I've hacked ~/sandbox so that ucfirst() upcases the first letter character that is not in a stripmarker, an html-like tag, an html character or decimal/hexadecimal numeric entity, and strips the various list markup and miscellaneous punctuation. For example, non-English text wrapped in a {{lang}} template has multiple leading html tags:

{{lang|es|casa}} → <span title="Spanish-language text"><i lang="es">casa</i></span> → casa

So we want the 'c' in casa to be uppercased:

{{#invoke:String2/sandbox|ucfirst|{{lang|es|casa}}}} → Casa

The live version of the function can't handle that:

{{#invoke:String2|ucfirst|{{lang|es|casa}}}} → Casa

Miscellaneous other examples:

• House ← {{#invoke:String2/sandbox|ucfirst|*house}}
• 'House ← {{#invoke:String2/sandbox|ucfirst|*{{'}}house}} – {{'}} → <span class="nowrap" style="padding-left:0.1em;">&#39;</span>
• House ← {{#invoke:String2/sandbox|ucfirst|*''house''}}
• House ← {{#invoke:String2/sandbox|ucfirst|*'''house'''}}
• 'House' ← {{#invoke:String2/sandbox|ucfirst|*''''house''''}} – malformed markup
• House ← {{#invoke:String2/sandbox|ucfirst|*'''''house'''''}}

Anything I've missed? Is there anything glaringly wrong with the implementation?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:27, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

There having been no comment (and after a bit of a fumble), I have updated the live module from the sandbox.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:48, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! Johnuniq (talk) 01:09, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

GetParameters dependency

I noticed that Module:String specifically does not have any dependencies, presumably so that it can be easily copied to other wikis. However, this module does, and the dependency it specifically requires is Module:GetParameters, which Module:String also uses: specifically, that module copies the function directly in its source to avoid any dependencies. (see: _str.getParameters)

I think it would be nice to do this also for this module, unless I'm misunderstanding the reasoning behind the original decision to omit it from Module:String. ClarFonThey (talk) 02:52, 5 July 2025 (UTC)

The original decision had to do with risk levels, IIRC; Module:String was one of the most-used modules on the project with 11.7 million uses, and at the time it wasn't wanted to give a then-obscure module so many uses. Since then Module:String2 has also become high-risk, though, so that's moot. I personally think we should take a few of the higher-use functions here and move them to Module:String so this module doesn't end up used so widely. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 19:05, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

Performance

I created a wiki page that consisted of 10,000 invocations to trim a string, reloaded (purged) the page a couple of times and checked the CPU time usage in the generated HTML source code. Three different ways to trim 10,000 strings:

• {{trim| foo }}: roughly between 0.5 seconds and 1.0 seconds
• {{#invoke|String2|trim| foo }}: between 2.5 seconds and 5.0 seconds
• {{#if:1| foo }}: between 0.1 seconds and 0.25 seconds

I guess the bad performance of {{#invoke|String2|trim| foo }} is due to module loading. If you care about performance, you should probably use {{trim| foo }} instead. Or if you really care, use the {{#if:1| foo }} trick. — Chrisahn (talk) 10:00, 4 July 2026 (UTC)

Requests

• The function _getParameters() should not be exported, it should be local. I fixed it in the sandbox. See Special:Diff/1362498383. Please apply to the main template. Thanks! — Chrisahn (talk) 10:12, 4 July 2026 (UTC)
• The functions _findpagetext, _escapePattern, _getBoolean and hyphen_to_dash should be local instead of exported. Special:Diff/1362503371. — Chrisahn (talk) 11:42, 4 July 2026 (UTC)
• The function isInteger() is unused and undocumented and should be removed. (It was used in Template:Start date until a year ago.) I removed it from the sandbox. See Special:Diff/1362504312. — Chrisahn (talk) 11:44, 4 July 2026 (UTC)
• The function _urldecode() is unused and should be removed. I removed it from the sandbox. See Special:Diff/1362503490. — Chrisahn (talk) 11:46, 4 July 2026 (UTC)

  How do you know that these functions are not used by another module? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:38, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

  User:Chrisahn, please see the question by MSGJ above. Disabling the request for now. —⁠andrybak (talk) 13:51, 26 July 2026 (UTC)