How to pass the chosen text to new page

General
1

Hello community,

One thing I miss about Obsidian is note refractor, i.e. select a block of text and add them to a new page, and in the original place there is now a link the new page. I'm considering write a command like this but I could not find api for passing select text to new page. I would be grateful if anyone could point me to the right direction.

Thank you for reading my post.

Update: Thank y'all again for taking your time to answer my question. After a little tinkering I achieved my goal to put selected text into new created page's title while creating from a page template. This is achieved by adding ${editor.getSelection().text} to the frontmatter choice suggestedName of the template.
I would like to thank @Mike for pointing me to this function.

(I realized in hindsight that I didn't even write my first goal out. I'm very sorry for my low effort question writing.)

I was amazed to find out that an official function Page: Extract did exactly what I described. For further customization I would dive harder into space-lua.

2

I'm not familiar with the note refactor function in Obsidian, but based on your description, I asked deepwiki to write me a function and it seems to work. This is the direction I would explore for such a function, using space.writePage() and editor.replaceRange()

BTW: the first solution deepwiki gave me made no sense whatsoever, so YMMV, but it typically helps me to get going.

command.define {  
  name = "Note: Refactor",  
  key = "Ctrl-Shift-r",  
  run = function()  
    local selection = editor.getSelection()  
      
    -- Check if text is selected  
    if not selection or selection.text == "" then  
      editor.flashNotification("No text selected", "error")  
      return  
    end  
      
    -- Extract the selected text  
    local text = selection.text  
      
    -- Try to extract a header as the suggested page name  
    local match = text:match("#%s*([^\n]+)")  
    local suggestedName = match or "new page"  
      
    -- Prompt for new page name  
    local newName = editor.prompt("New page name:", suggestedName)  
    if not newName or newName == "" then  
      return  
    end  
    newName = newName:trim()  
      
    -- Check if page already exists  
    if space.pageExists(newName) then  
      editor.flashNotification("Page " .. newName .. " already exists", "error")  
      return  
    end  
      
    -- Replace selection with wikilink  
    editor.replaceRange(selection.from, selection.to, "[[" .. newName .. "]]")  
      
    -- Write the new page with the extracted text  
    space.writePage(newName, text)  
      
    -- Navigate to the new page  
    editor.navigate(newName)  
      
    editor.flashNotification("Refactored to " .. newName, "info")  
  end  
}
3

Note that there's a Page: Extract command built-in that may just do exactly what you need (it's implemented in a JS plug though, not Space Lua).

4

Thank you so much for pointing to these two functions and providing sample codes. I will play with the code to see if I could customize the new page a bit more.

5

Thank you so much for pointing to this function. It works very neatly. I'm now looking to customize the created page e.g. using page templates.