Author: ian

Description:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/pywikipedia-l/2014-May/008740.html

There is a force flag, in the code, but it is not used to allow saving empty pages. It should be. Probably an easy fix along with this is that the correct exception is caught in Page._save and not re-raised - instead, a different
Exception is raised, which makes it harder to debug the code.

Here is an example script, and the error when running it

import pywikibot
site = pywikibot.Site()
page = pywikibot.Page(site, "MediaWiki:Lastmodifiedat")
page.text = ""
page.save()

Logging in to ianwiki:en as Ian Kelling
Traceback (most recent call last):

File "pwb.py", line 143, in <module>
  run_python_file(fn, argv, argvu)
File "pwb.py", line 67, in run_python_file
  exec(compile(source, filename, "exec"), main_mod.__dict__)
File "scripts/iansetup.py", line 5, in <module>
  page.save()
File "/a/opt/pywikibot/pywikibot/page.py", line 858, in save
  **kwargs)
File "/a/opt/pywikibot/pywikibot/page.py", line 884, in _save
  raise pywikibot.PageNotSaved("%s: %s" % (link, err))

pywikibot.exceptions.PageNotSaved
CRITICAL: Waiting for 1 network thread(s) to finish. Press ctrl-c to abort
<class 'pywikibot.exceptions.PageNotSaved'>

The cause is in site.py, in def editpage, line 2699:

if not text:
    raise Error("editpage: no text to be saved")

Version: core-(2.0)
Severity: normal