denoid-chakra / cologne-sanskrit-tamil

A port of http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/MWScan/tamil/index.html

Cologne-Sanskrit-Tamil

A port of http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/MWScan/tamil/index.html.

The 'Sanskrit and Tamil Dictionaries' is a web application created c. 2003 by Thomas Malten (who supplied the digitized dictionaries) and Kira Stöwe (who programmed the display) .

This repository contains all the programs and data required to run this application on an appropriate web server.

This has been tested on a computer with Windows Vista operating system running the XAMPP web server.

How to install on Windows computer with XAMPP

Experienced users will know various other ways to install this application. It is a Perl cgi web application. Here are details of one way to install.

• download the ZIP of this of this repository, about 22 mb

  • Unzip this to folder which will be named Cologne-Sanskrit-Tamil-master; the files in this folder are directories dat and sqlite, programs recherche.pl and cgi-include.pl, web page index.html and a couple of other files.,

• Install XAMPP for a Windows computer into C:\xampp directory

• move the Cologne-Sanskrit-Tamil-master folder into the C:\xampp\htdocs folder.

• Open the XAMPP COntrol Panel, and start the Apache module.

• Open a browser, and enter the url http://localhost/cologne/legacy/index.html

• Now the Sanskrit and Tamil Dictionaries display should be functioning.

Programming notes

• The two Perl modules used for the application are recherche.pl and cgi-include2.pl. Consistent with XAMPP conventions, these are not put into a separate 'cgi-bin' location, but are in the same directory as index.html. recherche.pl is the Perl module referenced as the value of the 'action' parameter of the 'form' element in index.html.
• The first line of these Perl modules reference the Perl executable as #!"C:\xampp\perl\bin\perl.exe"; this is appropriate for XAMPP.
• The dictionary data is accessed via the sqlite/tamil.sqlite database. This is a sqlite3 database, initialized from the ganz.txt file.
  ganz.txt contains data for all the dictionaries in the form of lines of 3 tab-delimited fields:
  • dictionary id 1,2,or 3. Data for a 4th dictionary (Pahlavi) is unused in the display.
  • headword
  • entry
• The batch file redo.bat in sqlite directory recreates the sqlite3 database tamil.sqlite. This uses the sqlite3.exe included in XAMPP. def.sql is the file that governs the creation of the 'tamil' table and the loading of ganz.txt into the tamil table.
• The search-engine of recherech.pl operates roughly as follows:
  • from the words and search options (exact, substring, prefix) of the Search input form, an sql query is formed.
  • This sql query is processed by the database (sqlite3) and results are returned and displayed on a separate page.
• In the Cologne version, the data is in a MySQL database; the sql query is slightly different for sqlite3 database.
• Initial examination suggests that the Cologne display and this XAMPP/sqlite3 port are almost, though not exactly, identical.

License request

If you install this on any public server, please add a notice that the data source is from http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/, or reference this repository https://github.com/sanskrit-lexicon/Cologne-Sanskrit-Tamil.

If you install this display under different configurations, please consider sharing the details of any changes required, so that others may benefit from your experience.