Modulus:languages/doc

Subpagina haec est documentatio de Modulus:languages. Hic legitur quomodo uti, ac categoriae, nexus invervici et cetera continentur qui modulus in origine non continet.

Purpose

This module is used to retrieve and manage Wiktionary's various languages and the information associated with them. See Wiktionary:Languages for more information.

This module provides access to other modules. To access the information from within a template, see Module:languages/templates.

The information itself is stored in the various data modules that are subpages of this module. They are listed in Categoria:Programmata linguarum. These modules should not be used directly by any other module, the data should only be accessed through the functions provided by Module:languages.

Finding and retrieving languages

The module exports a number of functions that are used to find languages.

getByCode

getByCode(code)

Finds the language whose code matches the one provided. If it exists, it returns a Language object representing the language. Otherwise, it returns nil.

getByCanonicalName

getByCanonicalName(name)

Finds the language whose canonical name (the name used to represent that language on Wiktionary) matches the one provided. If it exists, it returns a Language object representing the language. Otherwise, it returns nil. The canonical name of languages should always be unique (it is an error for two languages on Wiktionary to share the same canonical name), so this is guaranteed to give at most one result.

findByName

findByName(name, inexact)

This function is expensive

Finds languages which have the provided name among their list of possible names (including their canonical name). It returns a table containing Language objects for the languages found, or an empty table if none were found.

The inexact parameter can be given as true to perform a substring search of the name instead of an exact match. The result will then contain all languages that have the provided name as part of one of their possible names.

This function searches through the whole database of languages, and is therefore relatively resource-intensive. It should be used sparingly.

getAll

getAll()

This function is expensive

Returns a table containing Language objects for all languages, sorted by code.

This function searches through the whole database of languages, and is therefore relatively resource-intensive. It should be used sparingly.

Language objects

A Language object is returned from one of the functions above. It is a Lua representation of a language and the data associated with it. It has a number of methods that can be called on it, using the : syntax. For example:

local m_languages = require("Module:languages")
local lang = m_languages.getByCode("fr")
local name = lang:getCanonicalName()
-- "name" will now be "French"

Language:getCode

:getCode()

Returns the language code of the language. Example: "fr" for French.

Language:getCanonicalName

:getCanonicalName()

Returns the canonical name of the language. This is the name used to represent that language on Wiktionary, and is guaranteed to be unique to that language alone. Example: "French" for French.

Language:getAllNames

:getAllNames()

Returns a table of all names that the language is known by, including the canonical name. The names are not guaranteed to be unique, sometimes more than one language is known by the same name. Example: {"French", "Modern French"} for French.

Language:getType

:getType()

Returns the type of language, which can be "regular", "reconstructed" or "appendix-constructed".

Language:getWikimediaLanguages

:getWikimediaLanguages()

Returns a table containing WikimediaLanguage objects (see Module:wikimedia languages), which represent languages and their codes as they are used in Wikimedia projects for interwiki linking and such. More than one object may be returned, as a single Wiktionary language may correspond to multiple Wikimedia languages. For example, Wiktionary's single code sh (Serbo-Croatian) maps to four Wikimedia codes: sh (Serbo-Croatian), bs (Bosnian), hr (Croatian) and sr (Serbian).

The code for the Wikimedia language is retrieved from the wikimedia_codes property in the data modules. If that property is not present, the code of the current language is used. If none of the available codes is actually a valid Wikimedia code, an empty table is returned.

Language:getWikipediaArticle

:getWikipediaArticle()

Returns the name of the Wikipedia article for the language. This is either the wikipedia_article property in the data modules, or the category name returned by :getCategoryName.

Language:getScripts

:getScripts()

Returns a table of Script objects for all scripts that the language is written in. See Module:scripts.

Language:getFamily

:getFamily()

Returns a Family object for the language family that the language belongs to. See Module:families.

Language:getAncestors

:getAncestors()

Returns a table of Language objects for all languages that this language is directly descended from. Generally this is only a single language, but creoles, pidgins and mixed languages can have multiple ancestors.

Language:getCategoryName

:getCategoryName()

Returns the name of the main category of that language. Example: "French language" for French, whose category is at Category:French language.

Language:makeEntryName

:makeEntryName(term)

Converts the given term into the form used in the names of entries. This removes diacritical marks from the term if they are not considered part of the normal written form of the language, and which therefore are not permitted in page names. It also removes certain punctuation characters like final question marks or periods which are never present in page names. Example for Latin: "amō" → "amo" (macron is removed).

The replacements made by this function are defined by the entry_name setting for each language in the data modules.

Language:makeSortKey

:makeSortKey(term)

Creates a sort key for the given, following the rules appropriate for the language. This removes diacritical marks from the term if they are not considered significant for sorting, and may perform some other changes. Any initial hyphen is also removed, and anything parentheses is removed as well.

The replacements made by this function are defined by the sort_key setting for each language in the data modules.

Language:transliterate

:transliterate(text, sc, module_override)

Transliterates the text from the given script into the Latin script (see Wiktionary:Transliteration and romanization). The language must have the translit_module property for this to work; if it is not present, nil is returned.

The sc parameter is handled by the transliteration module, and how it is handled is specific to that module. Some transliteration modules may tolerate nil as the script, others require it to be one of the possible scripts that the module can transliterate, and will show an error if it's not one of them. For this reason, the sc parameter should always be provided when writing non-language-specific code.

The module_override parameter is used to override the default module that is used to provide the transliteration. This is useful in cases where you need to demonstrate a particular module in use, but there is no default module yet, or you want to demonstrate an alternative version of a transliteration module before making it official. It should not be used in real modules or templates, only for testing. All uses of this parameter are tracked by Template:tracking/module_override.

Language:getRawData

:getRawData()

This function is not for use in entries or other content pages.

Returns a blob of data about the language. The format of this blob is undocumented, and perhaps unstable; it's intended for things like the module's own unit-tests, which are "close friends" with the module and will be kept up-to-date as the format changes.