View source for Help:Converting between references formats

{{Wikipedia how to|H:FNCONV}}

This page describes procedures to convert the references from {{fnote}} defined in the body of the article to {{ldr}} where the references are defined in the reference list.

Such a conversion may be necessary in order to move text with many references from an article that uses the list-defined format to another article, or may be used to format all references in an article so that they all conform to the same format. It requires installation of the [[User:PleaseStand/References segregator|References segregator]] tool.

==Converting from the inline to the list-defined format==
* The [[User:PleaseStand/References segregator|References segregator]] tool can automatically convert all references to the list-defined format.
* Use a [[regular expression]] |search and replace operation to replace uses of {{tag|ref|o}} tags with the {{tl|r}} template. To do that, search for: <code><nowiki><ref name="(.*?)"/></nowiki></code>, and replace it with <code><nowiki>{{r\|"$1"}}</nowiki></code>, while checking the "Treat search string as a regular expression" checkbox.

==Converting from the list-defined to the inline format==
# Use a [[regular expression]] search and replace operation to replace uses of the {{tl|r}} template with {{tag|ref|o}} tags. To do that, search for: <code><nowiki>\{\{r\|([^}]+)\}\}</nowiki></code>, and replace it with {{tag|ref|s|params=name="$1"}}, while checking the "Treat search string as a regular expression" checkbox.
# Copy and remove (cut) the entire {{tl|reflist}} template with the list of references.
# Install the [[User:PleaseStand/References segregator|References segregator]] tool and click the "Segregate refs for editing" button.
# Remove all the empty {{tag|ref|o}} tags from the lower text box.
# Paste the list of references into the lower text box (after its existing contents).
# Save the page, which merges the citation templates from the lower text box into the upper text box and removes the unused footnotes in the process.

{{Wikipedia referencing}}