Template:Lunar quadrangle

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[edit] Template documentation
This documentation is transcluded from Template:Lunar quadrangle/doc. (edit | history)
This template has testcases (edit) for editors to experiment.
This template employs intricate features of template syntax.
You are encouraged to familiarise yourself with its setup and parser functions before editing the template. If your edit causes unexpected problems, please undo it quickly, as this template may appear on a large number of pages.
Remember that you can conduct experiments, and should test all improvements, in either the general Template sandbox or your user space before changing anything here.

[edit] Usage

This template is for automatically generating the name of the Lunar quadrangle that a point on the surface is in. It takes four parameters:

{{Lunar quadrangle
|latitude=
|N_or_S=
|longitude=
|E_or_W=
}}

So, for example, the point at "59.7° S, 21.5° E" would be input as:

"{{Lunar quadrangle|latitude=59.7|N_or_S=S|longitude=21.5|E_or_W=E}}"

Which would give us: "LQ27"

This template is intended primarily for use in conjunction with infoboxes and such, to allow categories such as Category:Craters on the Moon to be automatically divided into smaller geographically-grouped subcategories. It shouldn't be substed since that brings a bunch of intricate template coding into the article rather than the simple text name.

[edit] Structure

This template makes extensive use of comparison parser functions. A #switch statement couldn't be used for most of it because it deals with floating-point numeric ranges rather than discrete integers. To simplify the code, latitude is dealt with in the main template and then one of four sub-templates dealing solely with longitude may be called.

Each of these sub-templates has two complete lists of quadrangles that lie in the range of latitudes it's dealing with, the second list sorted in reverse from the first list to account for using east longitude instead of west longitude. So one should be able to use the full 0-360° range for both E and W longitude.

No similar provision was made for using negative latitude to indicate southern latitudes.