Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-2144972-20140417205827

Wikia's old search allowed to search the wikitext of the page rather than the display text of the page. It does make sense for most users, but I lost a valuable search method the day that changed.

Now I need it again. So my first thought was to check if I can do it in the API. No. "text search is disabled". I don't know how bots manage to do the same task. How do bots manage to do the same task? I need to do this.

The other alternatives, I guess, will have to be that I use a bot to do what I want. But I'm not doing a simple find and replace. I wrote JavaScript I want to perform on the relevant pages. So an idea was that I use pywikipedia and rewrite the script in Python, but the problem there is I can't get my head around how I would do that. And I don't know much about AWB and whether there is any language plugin stuffs I can do at all.

So my main question is how do I return a list of articles containing a specified string? If that isn't possible, is there a bot-system I can use that would allow me to write a simple script that modifies pages' wikitext? 