[sword-devel] Sword API Questions / Proposal >> flatapi.cpp / flatapi.h

[Simon J Mackenzie]

Appreciate the prompt reply!


On Tue, 3 Jun 2008 17:13:46 +1000, "Ben Morgan" <benpmorgan at gmail.com> sa
id:

Hi,



Some answers below...

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Simon J Mackenzie
<[1]smackoz at fastmail.fm> wrote:

I have been attempting to familiarise myself with flatapi.cpp/h
for a small in house project but have come up with a few
questions about the Sword API, particularly flatapi.cpp/h.

1) The function listkey_getVerselistIterator in flatapi currently
accepts two parameters but I fail to see the difference /
dissimilarity between the two parameters "char * list" and "char
* key"? Could someone please point me in the right direction?
Thank you.

The list is the actual text you want parsed. The key is some form
of context. Thus a list of "6:1-12" and a key of "John 3:16" will
give John 6:1-12.



Thank you this all makes sense now.

2) Is there any reason why the function
listkey_getVerselistIterator in flatapi.h does not accept a
boolean flag for normalising a bible reference such as "John
6:1,12-16"?
The current call to listkey_getVerselistIterator produces a
"verses" array containing [John 6:1, John 6:12] and not [John
6:1, John 6:12, John 6:13, John 6:14, John 6:15, John 6:16] as
would be expected.

Currently the flatapi does not allow proper parsing of biblical
references. Even with your proposed change, it will not allow you
to get at what you want.
The listkey that is returned in the contains keys.

Using the mod I proposed provides me enough to work with. An
array of single verse entries I can use to extract some biblical
text.

Each key is either a single verse (such as John 6:1)
or a contiguous range of verses (such as John 6:12-16)

Thus under python you can do:
>>> lk=vk.ParseVerseList("John 6:1,12-16", "", True)
>>> lk.getElement(0).getRangeText()
'John 6:1'
>>> lk.getElement(1).getRangeText()
'John 6:12-John 6:16'

However, the flatapi implementation uses getText, not
getRangeText, so it doesn't return the ranges. Updating it to do
this should result in it working. Note that the boolean flag you
are wanting added controls whether the ranges appear, or just the
first verse in each range.

However, I don't believe the flatapi bindings  are used at all,
and are not likely to be updated. They implement a very small
portion of the bindings. I'm not sure exactly what you are trying
to do, but trying to do it using one of the three methods below
is likely to work much better:
a) Python with the swig bindings - this is the approach BPBible
uses.
b) using c++ - like almost all Sword clients do
c) using java, with either JSword (like BibleDesktop) or the
corba bindings (as the web interface does (I believe))

d) using the flatapi bindings with D programming language, see
www.digitalmars.com.
For my joint managed congregarions here in Thailand I print the
Lectionary Readings for each Sunday. This is currently done
manually and is time comsuming and inefficient use of my time. In
my spare time I've began writing a small program in D to extract
a set of Lectionary readings (already working) for a given range
of Sundays (tabulated text file of Lectionary readings) and
format the extracted Lectionary readings (working on this now)
for import into OOo Writer for final layout and printing with a
minimum of user intervention. This has also been an opportunity
for me to evaluate the D programming language for future projects
(I used to be a programmer in my former life) which has been an
enoyable experience.
As I was looking over the flatapi code I started thinking ahead
and was wondering what the status of this code was. Your comment
confirmed that flatapi.cpp/h is far from complete but it is
sufficeint for the needs of my current small project. What the
future holds remains to be seen.
Regards
Simon

References

1. mailto:smackoz at fastmail.fm
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