[sword-devel] ACDCref, a modified ACDC module: hot-linking verse references

[Chris Little]

On 9/20/2010 8:08 AM, Peter von Kaehne wrote:
>> Von: Karl Kleinpaste<karl at kleinpaste.org>
>
>
>> We're all about Bible software; I think having modules that always link
>> Bible references is, by now and in our world, a base-level necessity.
>
> I think the same would apply to practically all the GenBook modules and commentary modules.
>
> I have found in CPAN a set of Perl modules which appear quite capable of finding references in large volumes of text - and can be configured to do the same on non English text. I have not yet tried them out, but will so shortly.

I have a faint recollection of trying that module and having no success, 
sadly.

Having written a regexp to churn through the Catholic Encyclopedia, 
looking for references and tagging them as such (an approx. 20 line 
regexp!), I can say that it is an exceptionally difficult task to guess 
at all of the ways that references will be marked, even within a 
relatively homogeneous text. I don't think it's possible to generalize 
that kind of tagger to work with any text in a language.

I've worked with an in-house tool developed by another Bible software 
developer that was supposed to detect and interpret all references (and 
it only cared about English). It worked so unreliably that it had to be 
modified to let me tag refs myself so that it only needed to do the 
interpretation part.

--Chris