Sections and subsections treated differently, is this API or mwclient?

Seeing issue when using page.text(section=x)

Consider following page:

== Section 1 ==
stuff

=== Subsection 1 ===
sub stuff

== Section 2 ==
stuff stuff

page.text(section=1) is

== Section 1 ==
stuff

=== Subsection 1 ===
sub stuff

page.text(section=2) is

=== Subsection 1 ===
sub stuff

Why is asking for section=1 including section=2?

Is this mwclient code issue or Mediawiki API problem?

Info: mwclient 0.8.1, python 2.6.6, Mediawiki 1.23

Considering how TOC is presented by Mediawiki, it makes sense to use floats, so sections are 1, 1.1 and 2.

[danmichaelo]

True, it’s a MediaWiki thing… I think it would be confusing to make a custom implementation in mwclient.

But note that you can get helpful TOC information from prop=sections, including

mwclient.Site('en.wikipedia.org').raw_api('parse', page='Paris', prop='sections')

{
   "parse": {
      "sections": [
         {
            "index": "1", 
            "level": "2", 
            "fromtitle": "Paris", 
            "toclevel": 1, 
            "number": "1", 
            "byteoffset": 9323, 
            "line": "History", 
            "anchor": "History"
         }, 
         {
            "index": "2", 
            "level": "3", 
            "fromtitle": "Paris", 
            "toclevel": 2, 
            "number": "1.1", 
            "byteoffset": 9380, 
            "line": "Etymology", 
            "anchor": "Etymology"
         }, 
         {
            "index": "3", 
            "level": "3", 
            "fromtitle": "Paris", 
            "toclevel": 2, 
            "number": "1.2", 
            "byteoffset": 10844, 
            "line": "Origins", 
            "anchor": "Origins"
         }, 
  ………
}

Perhaps we should add a sections() method on the Page object to simplify getting that information?

[danmichaelo]

Closing this issue. Feel free to open a new issue if you have ideas on how mwclient could make it easier to work with sections without breaking api compability. As mentioned, I’m considering adding .sections() to Page.