[sword-devel] Serious issue with SWORD utility emptyvss

[David Haslam]

Thanks DM,

The eXperimental module JSTX was rebuilt several times last night (& earlier) using imp2vs rather than osis2mod

I can confirm that several verses containing the chapter eID milestone were most definitely not listed by emptyvss when they had no text content!

It would be easy enough for you to test out.

- mod2imp KJV > KJV.raw.imp.txt

- edit KJV.raw.imp.txt by removing the last verse in any random chapter, but leaving the eID milestone intact.
- Rebuild the module (with a different name, say KJVX) using imp2vs
- emptyvss KJVX >KJVX.emptyvss.txt
- Open KJVX.emptyvss.txt with a text editor and see if it's got any lines
- If it's still a null file, then the bug has been demonstrated

NB. My intentional use of <seg/> in (eg) Song of Solomon is completely irrelevant to this bug.

Best regards,

David

Sent with [Proton Mail](https://pr.tn/ref/SWXT9A5YZ67G) secure email.

On Wednesday, May 14th, 2025 at 12:17 PM, DM Smith <dmsmith at crosswire.org> wrote:

> I think this bug is in osis2mod. It is not supposed to output book, chapter or verse starts or ends. I’m guessing that the chapter ends are present because of the handling of colophons, which come after the end of the last chapter of the book.
>
> The design of emptyvss is that it doesn’t care what kind of markup (e.g. ThML, GBF, OSIS) is used. If the verse content has zero length then the verse is missing.
>
> I think you have been trying to add “invisible” markup to modules to make them seem like they are present in Xiphos. It’s hard to have it both ways.
>
> In Him,
> DM
>
>> On May 14, 2025, at 4:09 AM, David Haslam <dfhdfh at protonmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I will soon report this in MODTOOLS in the CrossWire tracker, but this is to inform about the following:
>>
>> emptyvss does not detect all empty verses!!!
>> I suspect that it's looking for verses with the "null string" so it misses detecting any verse that only contains invisible XML content.
>>
>> The main candidate of that class is the last verse of each chapter.
>> When the verse text is missing, such a verse still contains the XML milestone
>>
>>> <chapter eID="...." osisID="...." />
>>
>> E.g.
>>
>>> <chapter eID="gen31843" osisID="Jas.1"/>
>>
>> I encountered exactly this problem yesterday while I was working on the JST module.
>> Some of the missing verses were the last one in various chapters.
>>
>> I'm quite astounded that I've been using this utility for almost 15 years and it's only just come to light. It's a vital part of our armory for analysing new and updated modules.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> David
>>
>> Sent with [Proton Mail](https://pr.tn/ref/SWXT9A5YZ67G) secure email.
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