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About
This Resource
In early
1994, the international governing council of the Bahá'í
Faith, the Universal House of Justice, released ASCII
versions of all of the Bahá'í sacred writings
that have been published in English. Other languages are to
follow.
While
software packages exist for personal computers to search
these electronic versions, nothing as of yet has been put
up on the Web. This is an initial attempt to take advantage
of having such a large body of searchable text, in the hopes
that it will be of use to all students of the Bahá'í
Faith, no matter their religion or if they even believe
in religion.
Known
Problems
Here is
a list of problems that are known, and could be fixed; volunteers
are always welcome!
-
We do not accept diacriticals as input for searching.
-
Add support to reference works by paragraph #, not just
page no
-
When generating index, allow for way to write over old
entries, instead of doing everything from scratch.
-
Figure out how to skip over/handle/parse footnotes
-
Should "Kitáb-i-Aqdas" or "`Abdu'l-Bahá"
be treated as single words?
Comments,
suggestions, and questions are welcome.
How
It Works
Skip this
part if you don't want to know the gritty technical details.
This
resource depends largely on the GNU tool ptx,
written by François
Pinard. ptx generates what is known as a permuted
index, which is perfect for KWIC (Key Word In Context)
searches!
The
main work of the search itself is done by ptx and
its output is piped through the script ptx2indx.pl.
This script takes each line of ptx's output (which
has been invoked with the -T -A options) and writes to a
file (named after that word) the file and the line where
the word occurs. For example, here is the file for the word
"agreed":
esw:5148
gpb:5676
iqa:2288,3146
mf:395,5985,6197
pdc:3331,3809
pt:2525
pup:2975,3057,3068,4515,5279,6643,6945,8055,8477,8488,
9208,9217,9613,10109,10706,12915,13894,14563,15758,
16016,16527,18260
sab:10023
saq:705,741,9320
sdc:2326
tab:2304
tdp:1477,2244
tn:34,88,516,729,786
wob:7000
After this
index has been generated, the CGI
Perl script
true-seeker.pl is invoked from one of the search forms, opens
the file associated with the main word, opens each book the
user asked to search, and then generates HTML references for
each "hit" that it finds. |
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