User:Bináris/Pywikibot cookbook

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Pywikibot is the ninth wonder of the world, the eighth being MediaWiki itself.

This page is for you, if you
 * already have some experience with Pywikibot and have some vision about its capabilities
 * have some basic knowledge of Python
 * want to hack your own scripts
 * are already familiar with Manual:Pywikibot and especially Manual:Pywikibot/Create your own script.

Pywikibot is very flexible and powerful tool to edit Wikipedia or another MediaWiki instance. However, there comes the moment when you feel that something is missing from it, and the Universe calls you to write your own scripts. Don't be afraid, this is not a disease, this is the natural way of personal evolution. Pywikibot is waiting for you: you will find the  directory with a bare , which is ready to host your scripts.

(A personal confession from the creator of this page: I just wanted to use Pywikipedia, as we called it in the old times, then I wanted to slightly modify some of the scripts to better fit to my needs, then I went to the book store and bought my first Python book. So it goes.)

Creating a script

 * Encoding and environment: It is vital, that all Python 3 source files MUST be UTF-8 without a BOM. Therefore it is a good idea to forget the bare Notepad of Windows forever, because it has the habit to soil files with BOM. The minimal suggested editor is Notepad++, which is developed for programming purposes and is cross-platform. It has an Encoding menu where you see what I am speaking about, and you may set UTF-8 without BOM as default encoding. Any real programming IDE will do the job properly, e.g. Visual Studio Code is quite popular nowadays. Python has an integrated editor called IDLE, which uses proper encoding, but for some mysterious reason does not show line numbers, so you will suffer a lot from error messages, when you keep trying to find the 148th line of your code.


 * Where to put:  directory is designed to host your scripts. This is a great idea, because this directory will be untouched when you update Pywikibot, and you can easily backup your own work, regarding just this directory.

Beginning and ending
In most cases you see something like this in the very first line of Pywkibot scripts:

or

This is a shebang. If you use a Unix-like system, you know what it is for. If you run your scripts on Windows, you may just omit this line, it does not do anything. But it can be a good idea to use anyway in order someday others want to use your script.

The very last two lines of the scripts also follow a pattern. They usually look like this: This is a good practice in Python. When you run the script directly from command line (that's what we call directory mode), the condition will be true, and the  function will be called. That's where you handle arguments and start the process. On the other side, if you import the script (that is the library mode), the condition evaluates to false, and nothing happens (just the lines on the main level of your script will be executed). Thus you may directly call the function or method you need.

Documentation and help
We have three levels of documentation. As you go forward into understanding Pywikibot, you will become more and more familiar with these levels.
 * 1) Manual:Pywikibot – written by humans for humans. This is recommended for beginners. It also has a "Get help" box.
 * 2) https://doc.wikimedia.org/pywikibot – mostly autogenerated technical documentation with all the fine details you are looking for. Click on   if you use the latest deployed stable version of Pywikibot, and on   if you use the actual version that is still under development. Differences are usually small.
 * 3) The code itself. It is useful if you don't find something in documentation or you want to find working solutions and good practices. You may reach it from the above docs (every class and method has a   link) or from your computer.