[sword-devel] Comming soon: new improved sword searching

[Joel Mawhorter]

On September 8, 2002 00:36, porton@narod.ru wrote:
> Very please also make possibility to search in Bible paragraphs instead of
> Bible verses.

This is a much bigger issue than you may realize. I think fundamental changes 
to Sword would be necessary to support this. Fortunately, sword has a fairly 
flexible key mechanism for indexing into texts so this would be a possible 
change or addition in the future. However, this is not a decission for me to 
make. Perhaps Troy can comment on this.

> This is because verses are introduced by people and are just arbitrary, but
> splitting Bible in paragraphs (at least in the correct manuscripts) is
> inspired by Holy Spirit! So borders of paragraphs is a very important
> matter (otherwise God wouldn't split Bible into paragraphs at all to reduce
> sizes and weights of the rolls).

Verses are arbitrary and man made but they are a useful tool and they are the 
mechanism that everybody who uses the Bible is used to so I would rather 
stick with this. One of the features I mentioned in my first email is a 
proximity and operator. This would allow searching within a certain, user 
specified, number of verses. Here is the example I gave:

"For example, ("lamb of God", Jesus, "take away", sins @3) will find all 
combinations of verses within 3 of each other that have all the search terms 
in them."

Useing something like @20 (within 20 verses) would allow very rough 
approximation of what you are suggesting.

Joel