Scripture API?

#21

We moved your original post over to [thread=229]this thread[/thread] about the samsung blackjack. The answers should be posted there.

mkmurray · #22

Tom W.,

Since an open source scripture study program isn't going to be built directly on top of the current scripture display, will there be an API where the html (italics, links, etc.) for a particular verse or its footnotes can be obtained?

Thanks.

WelchTC · #23

mkmurray wrote:Tom W.,

Since an open source scripture study program isn't going to be built directly on top of the current scripture display, will there be an API where the html (italics, links, etc.) for a particular verse or its footnotes can be obtained?

Thanks.

Currently there are no plans to provide that. However there is discussion about providing an API to the online scriptures where you could extract what ever information you needed. However, that has not been approved as of yet and could take some time to get approved, if it ever does at all.

Tom

mkmurray · #24

tomw wrote:Currently there are no plans to provide that. However there is discussion about providing an API to the online scriptures where you could extract what ever information you needed. However, that has not been approved as of yet and could take some time to get approved, if it ever does at all.

Tom

How would you suggest obtaining scriptural text and footnotes until then? Is there a legit way of obtaining that without breaking any copyrights or privacy policies of the Church?

WelchTC · #25

mkmurray wrote:How would you suggest obtaining scriptural text and footnotes until then? Is there a legit way of obtaining that without breaking any copyrights or privacy policies of the Church?

I don't have an answer for you right now. I'll keep everyone updated as the discussions progress around an API.

Tom

mkmurray · #26

tomw wrote:I don't have an answer for you right now. I'll keep everyone updated as the discussions progress around an API.

Tom

So I heard from a friend about a group at BYU that are trying to build a Mac desktop app to study the scriptures. It appears that they have done a little research and the scripture content can't be redistributed, so the solution is to have the app download the scripture content locally for every user. The terms and policies of the scriptures allow each user to download, copy, and print scripture content for personal use.

I wrote a little C# application that downloads all of the content pages off of scriptures.lds.org. It's about 100 MB for the whole site. However, the links on each page still point online. When I was at BYU, I wrote a Web Cloner in C++ that would download all content of a site and change the links to all be local. I'm not sure if I'll be able to find that code, but I would prefer to use a program like that to get the scripture content so as to keep the linking structures in place between pages.

Thoughts, everyone? Anyone else also write the Web Cloner (in case I can't find mine)?

mkmurray · #27

It appears I found a colleague that still had their Web Cloner; I'm gonna give that a try in addition to the little app I wrote.

russellhltn · #28

mkmurray wrote:so the solution is to have the app download the scripture content locally for every user. The terms and policies of the scriptures allow each user to download, copy, and print scripture content for personal use.

That's the way some of the PDA version of the scriptures are handled - the user downloads and converts them using the supplied application. What's slick is they've done it so that you can do it for any of the things on the church website - so you're not limited to the scriptures.

#29

mkmurray wrote:I wrote a little C# application that downloads all of the content pages off of scriptures.lds.org. It's about 100 MB for the whole site. However, the links on each page still point online. When I was at BYU, I wrote a Web Cloner in C++ that would download all content of a site and change the links to all be local. I'm not sure if I'll be able to find that code, but I would prefer to use a program like that to get the scripture content so as to keep the linking structures in place between pages.

Thoughts, everyone? Anyone else also write the Web Cloner (in case I can't find mine)?

Have you tried the 'wget' program commonly available on Linux and other Unix-like systems? The man page is pretty long, but I think I saw some stuff in there about retargeting links for just such an application.

Oh, the actual scriptural content in plain text form is only about 7.5MB, excluding footnotes and other stuff. I got my copy from the floppy-based product the Church used to distribute, after a little expansion of the weak compression scheme on the floppies. Piped chains of 'grep' commands to find verses with combinations of words are nearly instantaneous.

#30

rmrichesjr wrote:Have you tried the 'wget' program commonly available on Linux and other Unix-like systems? The man page is pretty long, but I think I saw some stuff in there about retargeting links for just such an application.

Oh, the actual scriptural content in plain text form is only about 7.5MB, excluding footnotes and other stuff. I got my copy from the floppy-based product the Church used to distribute, after a little expansion of the weak compression scheme on the floppies. Piped chains of 'grep' commands to find verses with combinations of words are nearly instantaneous.

Though I am sure most of us are comfortable with the Linux command line, the common church membership and those that would benefit from this program most likely don't know the difference between bash or DOS. Also I noticed that mkmurray wrote the program in C# which makes it petty much a Windows program for the general populace.