Template:Mars quadrangle/doc

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This is a documentation subpage for Template:Mars quadrangle (see that page for the template itself).
It contains usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page.

[edit] Usage

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

{{Mars 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:

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

Which would give us: "Noachis"

This template is intended primarily for use in conjunction with infoboxes and such, to allow categories such as Category:Craters on Mars 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.