Board Thread:Wiki Technical Discussion/@comment-4356266-20170205031227

I've went ahead and made essentially a special-purpose data format, with records and fields, and a parser that converts it to HTML table. The idea is to eliminate 400+ wikitext parser function calls, and replace it with a single call to a lua program. At first I want to peruse the comma-separated values (CSV) format, which already has a lua library and easily editable in any spreadsheet program, but I think it's more important to make the data editable and readable on HPW itself.

So far the lua call takes 1.79+-s, a bit more than 1.39s that the original parser approach takes, but it all comes down to optimizing the script.

The test data file can be found here, the module here and the table here.

I'd like to get feedback specifically on the new data format i.e. whether you'd want to edit a file of such format by hand. If enough people want to use CSV, I can convert the data to that format so that it'd be editable with Excel, with the catch of losing readability and the ability to edit the data by hand. 