V9: clean wikitext replace for bot-plugins

Is there any way to get the original wikitext for a specific model? Not converting it back like wtf-plugin-wikitext does, but like a startIndex, endIndex into the originally parsed wikitext string?

I want to be able to convert back to wikitext while keeping the originally desired user formatting, just changing the text in one or two rows of a table.

Almost something like

const [brandTable] = tldDoc.sections('Brand top-level domains').tables();
brandTable.data
  .map(r => {
    if(r.Name === '.somebrand') {
      r.Name = new Sentence('');
      return r.wikitext(); //It's a table _row_ so it doesn't really have that but I can manage on my end
    }
    else {
      return r.originalWikiText(); //Just returns the original wikitext for that row
    }
  })
  .join('\n');

…where r.originalWikiText() would basically just, return the

Is this even possible? Could the parser decorate the models with this information? Is this something that would be valuable in a PR? Trying to write a Wikipedia bot that updates a table…

[spencermountain]

yep - I’ve been thinking about this too. Let me take a crack at it, i’ve got some time over the holidays. I don’t have any clear ideas, but maybe it will help to just try a few things. will let you know how it goes

[spencermountain]

hey @Cobertos - I haven’t got a solution to this, but haven’t forgotten.

Plan is to do a fuzzy-match on the original wikitext, then allow replacing chunks of it - hard part is that the model isn’t built-well for reproducing subsets of the document, like the table use-case you mentioned.

I will almost-certainly be over-thinking this over the winter, but should scale-back my promises for it. cheers