You might want to consider the start of this tutorial.

Short introductions to other TF datasets:

• Dead Sea Scrolls,
• Old Babylonian Letters,

or the

• Quran

Search Introduction¶

Search in Text-Fabric is a template based way of looking for structural patterns in your dataset.

Within Text-Fabric we have the unique possibility to combine the ease of formulating search templates for complicated syntactical patterns with the power of programmatically processing the results.

This notebook will show you how to get up and running.

Alternative for hand-coding¶

Search is a powerful feature for a wide range of purposes.

Quite a bit of the implementation work has been dedicated to optimize performance. Yet I do not pretend to have found optimal strategies for all possible search templates. Some search tasks may turn out to be somewhat costly or even very costly.

That being said, I think search might turn out helpful in many cases, especially by reducing the amount of hand-coding needed to work with special subsets of your data.

Easy command¶

Search is as simple as saying (just an example)

results = A.search(template)
A.show(results)

See all ins and outs in the search template docs.

Incantation¶

The ins and outs of installing Text-Fabric, getting the corpus, and initializing a notebook are explained in the start tutorial.

Basic search command¶

We start with the most simple form of issuing a query. Let's search for the word Māro in the Pali text. We also want to show the clauses in which they occur.

But first: how do you type that ā? To be honest: I don't know either.

Text-Fabric has a handy function to give you a palette of all the non-ASCII characters in the corpus:

Now, if you click on a letter, it is stored on your clipboard, ready to paste. To help you remember where you clicked last, the letter becomes yellow.

We have the results. We only need to display them. Here they are in a table:

The hyperlinks in the p column point to the Tipitaka site, to the stanza most relevant to the individual results.

Here is the first one in a pretty display:

We can also stop unravelling structure at the clause level:

Condense results¶

There are two fundamentally different ways of presenting the results: condensed and uncondensed.

In uncondensed view, all results are listed individually. You can keep track of which parts belong to which results. The display can become unwieldy.

This is the default view, because it is the straightest, most logical, answer to your query.

In condensed view all nodes of all results are grouped in containers first (e.g. stanzas), and then presented container by container. You loose the information of what parts belong to what result.

Here is an example of the difference.

There are multiple occurrences of maṃ in the clauses.

Now in condensed mode:

Much more compact.

And in a pretty display we get for the first 6 hits:

We can make it more compact by condensing into clauses instead of stanzas:

Custom highlighting¶

We can apply different highlight colours to different parts of the result. The words in the pair are member 5 and 6 of the result tuples. The members that we do not map, will not be highlighted. The members that we map to the empty string will be highlighted with the default color.

NB: Choose your colours from the CSS specification.

Or with more glory:

Color mapping works best for uncondensed results. If you condense results, some nodes may occupy different positions in different results. It is unpredictable which color will be used for such nodes:

Constraining order¶

You can stipulate an order on the words in your template. You only have to put a relational operator between them. Say we want only results where maṃ follows avadhi.

We can also require the words to be adjacent.

Custom feature display¶

We would like to see the frequency. The way to do that, is to perform a display setup first. By the way, we can also include the highlight colours in the display setup.

Now we completely reset the display customization.

As you see, you have total control.

All steps¶

• start your first step in mastering the bible computationally
• search turbo charge your hand-coding with search templates

CC-BY Dirk Roorda