Template:Str ≤ ≥ len

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Lua String-based templates

This is the {{str ≤ ≥ len}} meta-template.

It helps other templates check if a string is "shorter" vs. "equally long" vs. "longer" than a given length.

Note! For most usage cases it might be better to use {{str ≥ len}}. (See the see also section below.)

Usage

This template takes 3 to 5 unnamed parameters.

Here is how to check if the string "abcde" is 4 characters long:

{{str ≤ ≥ len | abcde | 4
| Shorter.
| Equal.
| Longer.
}}

Which returns this:

Templates have a problem to handle parameter data that contains equal signs "=". But that is easily solved by using numbered parameters. Here we check if the string "ab=cde" is 100 characters long:

{{str ≤ ≥ len
| 1 = ab=cde
| 2 = 100
| 3 = Shorter, not "=".
| 4 = Equal "=".
| 5 = Longer, not "=".
}}

Which returns this:

Shorter, not "=".

It probably is a good habit to always use the numbered parameters, since you might not know beforehand exactly how the data will look that your template will feed to this meta-template.

Parameters

Detailed parameter explanation:

{{str ≤ ≥ len
| 1 = A string.
| 2 = A length.
| 3 = Data to return/render when "shorter than".
| 4 = Data to return/render when "equally long".
| 5 = Data to return/render when "longer than".
}}

Empty or undefined strings are considered to be of 0 length.

Length values below 0 are considered to be 0.

Technical details

Potential alternative templates names would be {{str <=> len}}, {{str >=< len}} or {{str ≥ ≤ len}}, but we can't use the first two of those template names since they don't work in MediaWiki.

Even though this is a string handling template it uses efficient code. (While some of the other string handling templates are probably so heavy on the servers that we perhaps should not use them.)

Templates have problems to handle parameter data that contains pipes "|", unless the pipe is inside another template {{name|param1}} or inside a piped link [[Help:Template|help]]. Thus templates can not handle wikitables as input unless you escape them by using the {{!}} template. This makes it hard to use wikitables as parameters to templates. Instead the usual solution is to use "HTML wikimarkup" for the table code, which is more robust.

See also