Don Marti

Wed 27 Aug 2008 12:20:54 AM PDT

pagespec

To select a set of pages, such as pages that are locked, pages whose commit emails you want subscribe to, or pages to combine into a blog, the wiki uses a PageSpec. This is an expression that matches a set of pages.

The simplest PageSpec is a simple list of pages. For example, this matches any of the three listed pages:

foo or bar or baz

More often you will want to match any pages that have a particular thing in their name. You can do this using a glob pattern. "*" stands for any part of a page name, and "?" for any single letter of a page name. So this matches all pages about music, and any SubPages of the SandBox, but does not match the SandBox itself:

*music* or SandBox/*

You can also prefix an item with "!" to skip pages that match it. So to match all pages except for Discussion pages and the SandBox:

* and !SandBox and !*/Discussion

Some more elaborate limits can be added to what matches using these functions:

• "glob(someglob)" - matches pages and other files that match the given glob. Just writing the glob by itself is actually a shorthand for this function.
• "page(glob)" - like glob(), but only matches pages, not other files
• "link(page)" - matches only pages that link to a given page (or glob)
• "tagged(tag)" - matches pages that are tagged or link to the given tag (or tags matched by a glob)
• "backlink(page)" - matches only pages that a given page links to
• "creation_month(month)" - matches only files created on the given month number
• "creation_day(mday)" - or day of the month
• "creation_year(year)" - or year
• "created_after(page)" - matches only files created after the given page was created
• "created_before(page)" - matches only files created before the given page was created
• "internal(glob)" - like glob(), but matches even internal-use pages that globs do not usually match.
• "title(glob)", "author(glob)", "authorurl(glob)", "license(glob)", "copyright(glob)", "guid(glob)"
  • match pages that have the given metadata, matching the specified glob.
• "user(username)" - tests whether a modification is being made by a user with the specified username. If openid is enabled, an openid can also be put here. Glob patterns can be used in the username. For example, to match all openid users, use user(*://*)
• "admin()" - tests whether a modification is being made by one of the wiki admins.
• "ip(address)" - tests whether a modification is being made from the specified IP address.
• "comment(glob)" - matches comments to a page matching the glob.
• "comment_pending(glob)" - matches unmoderated, pending comments.
• "postcomment(glob)" - matches only when comments are being posted to a page matching the specified glob

For example, to match all pages in a blog that link to the page about music and were written in 2005:

blog/* and link(music) and creation_year(2005)

Note the use of "and" in the above example, that means that only pages that match each of the three expressions match the whole. Use "and" when you want to combine expression like that; "or" when it's enough for a page to match one expression. Note that it doesn't make sense to say "index and SandBox", since no page can match both expressions.

More complex expressions can also be created, by using parentheses for grouping. For example, to match pages in a blog that are tagged with either of two tags, use:

blog/* and (tagged(foo) or tagged(bar))

Note that page names in PageSpecs are matched against the absolute filenames of the pages in the wiki, so a pagespec "foo" used on page "a/b" will not match a page named "a/foo" or "a/b/foo". To match relative to the directory of the page containing the pagespec, you can use "./". For example, "./foo" on page "a/b" matches page "a/foo".

To indicate the name of the page the PageSpec is used in, you can use a single dot. For example, link(.) matches all the pages linking to the page containing the PageSpec.