bible_reference

Parse, sort and pretty-print Bible references.

This module implements classes that I have developed to parse and output Bible references. With some 3,000 years of literary history, that’s not as simple a task as one might think, especially when dealing with several languages. Rudimentary datafiles for English are supplied, but the most detailed representation is for my native German.

If you have any questions or suggestions, contact me at Diedrich Vorberg ‹diedrich@tux4web.de›!

Some introduction

infofile.py

Information is stored in a special CSV-like textfile format documented in the infofile.py.

bible_reference.py

bible_reference.Canon

A canon is the representation of an order of Biblical Books loaded from a .canon (info-) file.

There is an internal (default) naming-scheme for Biblical books that consists of mostly tow-letter English abbreviations. That’s hardcoded in the info-files, not so much in the Python code. The order of the books in the .canon file will be the sort order of the books. These internal names are refered to throughout the code as a book’s intid.

bible_reference.BiblicalBook

Implement comparison (that is: sorting) of biblical books by canon order.

bible_reference.NamingScheme

Return an intid for a Biblical book and provide unified human-readable representations.

bible_reference.bible_reference_re()

Return a regular expression object matching Bible references that use names from any of the naming schemes. Ordinals will not be checked (“9.Cor” will match) nor key plausibility (meaning, ambigious naming schemes will yield undefined results).

The resulting regex should match German („1.Kor 2,12“) and English (1Cor 2:12) biblical references. Your milage for English references may vary, for it has not been tested extensively.

bible_reference.BibleReference

Here is where it all comes together. An instance is created using

br = BibleReference(BiblicalBook("Jn"), 3, 16)

or

from bible_reference import BibleReference
from bible_reference.naming_schemes import RGG, Luther84_abbr

br = BibleReference.parse("Joh 3,16", [ Luther84_abbr, RGG, ])

For represenration, the first naming scheme passed to the constructor is used by default.

There is a directory postgresql/ containing example code on how to use this for sorting biblical references in the a relational database in canonical order. See postgresql/README.md