Reencoding MediaWiki pages

The following script will convert HTML from a MediaWiki page to Wikitext. The script was written to facilitate the 2009 VTLUUG servers migration.

Contents

Script

## CLEANUP ##
# Comments
/<!--/d
# Table of contents
/<table id="toc/,/<\/table>/ d
# Paragraph tags
s|</?p>||g
# Anchor tags
s|<a name="[^"]*"></a>||g
# Make breaks XHTML
s|<br>|<br />|g
# Quotation marks
s|’|'|g
s|“|"|g
s|”|"|g

## WIKIFY ##
# Italics and bold
s|</?i>|''|g
s|</?b>|'''|g
# Headings
s|<h1>.*>(.*)</span></h1>|=\1=|g
s|<h2>.*>(.*)</span></h2>|==\1==|g
s|<h3>.*>(.*)</span></h3>|===\1===|g
s|<h4>.*>(.*)</span></h4>|====\1====|g
# Internal links
s|<a href="http://vtluug.org/wiki/[^>]*>([^<]*)</a>|[[\1]]|g
# External links
s|<a href="([^"]*)"[^>]*>([^<]*)</a>|[\1 \2]|g

Running

One-Shot

Replace input.html and out.wikitext with appropriate filenames.

sed -rn -e '/<!-- start content -->/,/<!--/p' input.html | sed -r -f script > out.wikitext

Batch

The following command will create .wikitext files of all the HTML files in the current directory for your cut and paste convenience.

for f in *.html ; do $( sed -rn -e '/<!-- start content -->/,/<!--/p' "$f" | sed -r -f script > "$f.wikitext" ) ; done

Copying

Once the .wikitext files are generated, you can simply open them up, edit them by hand if necessary, and copy and paste them into MediaWiki. Noting that this is an import in the summary box is recommended.

gedit *.wikitext

Effectiveness

The script was effective enough for our purposes when written, but it has some shortcomings. Images and local article links are handled poorly and it does not attempt to produce the brace-bar-dash table markup.