Editing Module talk:Hatnote (section)

== Category handling ==

As I've been working on Lua-fying hatnotes, I've noticed that this module's <code>_hatnote()</code> function doesn't really support categories. Most of the time categories are either awkwardly concatenated in as strings, or appended after the call to <code>_hatnote()</code>. Moreover, this means each one needs to reimplement category handling, and there have been inconsistencies between the various templates/modules. For example, {{tl|About}} had some category-handling that I left out when migrating it to Lua (category was emptied, so not urgent, but…), and used a <code>_nocat</code> parameter, while the standard for [[Module:Hatnote]]-based templates seems to be <code>args.category</code>.

Would anyone object to my adding a <code>category</code> argument to <code>_hatnote()</code>? I'd code it to accept a table (or <code>nil</code>), with category name keys (prevents duplicates) and <code>false</code> or category-key (string) values, and output a list of categories after the hatnote text. I'd also add a helper function <code>addCategory()</code> to add items to category tables, so that that wouldn't need to be reimplemented in each hatnote module. The main thing I'm hesitating on is that since <code>_hatnote()</code> doesn't itself get template arguments, templates would each need to include something like <code>yesno(args.category)</code> to toggle output—it's not self-contained.

I'm not 100% sure of the approach and welcome suggestions on other ways to handle categories. <span style="white-space:nowrap;">{&#123;[[User:Nihiltres|<span style="color:#233D7A;">Nihiltres</span>]]&#8202;&#124;[[User talk:Nihiltres|talk]]&#8202;&#124;[[Special:Contributions/Nihiltres|edits]]}&#125;</span> 14:44, 11 May 2016 (UTC)