Linking to scriptures on church website

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BrianEdwards
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Re: Linking to scriptures on church website

#11

Post by BrianEdwards »

Is there a way to only pass certain verses for processing.....
For better visibility, you might want to consider posting your comment/request as a new thread, since it's easy for this to be missed as part of a larger discussion (I see you've also posted essentially the same request in another thread).

I hope you've submitted Feedback, since from what I understand the Church does gather data about how frequently certain features are requested, so although we're never sure to what degree, it does seem that quantity of feature requests does matter.

That said, it does appear what you describe has been implemented by the Church to some degree, although who knows how complicated or straightforward it is. When I click on a footnote in a scripture in Gospel Library (either web or app), the displayed verse in the sidebar only shows the highlighted verses, and not the entire chapter. Again, perhaps there's internal code that processes what ends up displayed in the footnote bar, but it would be nice to know if there's existing "hidden" functionality that would return only the content you prefer.
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sbradshaw
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Re: Linking to scriptures on church website

#12

Post by sbradshaw »

italyrm wrote: Mon Apr 17, 2023 6:58 am the thing about this link

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/stu ... g&id=p1#p1

is that it only works on the website, and only to anchor the page to that verse and put a "highlighting" line to the left of the verse(s). If you are trying to do anything downstream with this..... natural language processing, create plans etc it is not useful as the url still passes the entire webpage to beautiful soup or any web scraping package.

Is there a way to only pass certain verses for processing or are the URL calls only intended to look nice on a webpage but not be useful for anything downstream?

My ultimate use case would be to return an object which is only the verse(s) of the chapter I included in the url to then be able to share/do text processing on.

And my frustration is that URL I shared does not only return 1 Nephi Ch1 v , it returns the whole chapter and that is not what I want, nor what I expect when I formatted the URL. The URL only changes the CSS of the returned webpage - and that does not add utility for those looking to truly share one verse, groups of verses or develop tools to help futher understanding of the scriptures.
What you're looking for is an API for Gospel Library content – unfortunately, there are no public APIs for the scriptures or other Church content. However, there are a few places online where you can get the text of the English scriptures in JSON or other formats, if it's helpful.
Samuel Bradshaw • If you desire to serve God, you are called to the work.
italyrm
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Re: Linking to scriptures on church website

#13

Post by italyrm »

sbradshaw wrote: Mon Apr 17, 2023 12:01 pm
italyrm wrote: Mon Apr 17, 2023 6:58 am the thing about this link

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/stu ... g&id=p1#p1

is that it only works on the website, and only to anchor the page to that verse and put a "highlighting" line to the left of the verse(s). If you are trying to do anything downstream with this..... natural language processing, create plans etc it is not useful as the url still passes the entire webpage to beautiful soup or any web scraping package.

Is there a way to only pass certain verses for processing or are the URL calls only intended to look nice on a webpage but not be useful for anything downstream?

My ultimate use case would be to return an object which is only the verse(s) of the chapter I included in the url to then be able to share/do text processing on.

And my frustration is that URL I shared does not only return 1 Nephi Ch1 v , it returns the whole chapter and that is not what I want, nor what I expect when I formatted the URL. The URL only changes the CSS of the returned webpage - and that does not add utility for those looking to truly share one verse, groups of verses or develop tools to help futher understanding of the scriptures.
What you're looking for is an API for Gospel Library content – unfortunately, there are no public APIs for the scriptures or other Church content. However, there are a few places online where you can get the text of the English scriptures in JSON or other formats, if it's helpful.
An API would work - but that's not available. What I would ultimately want is a react.js website where I could specifiy which verses, multiple chapters to call that I could then change the display for more easily. This is something I could code myself even. It would take the paragraph class for the verses and then allow a user to select which they wanted to select to view on the page.

BUT

In the mean time, I have parsed the HTML myself through a package called BeautfulSoup in python and can index the verses I want to display. This will allow me to create links to only 'x' verses easily and do analysis on them. I can even loop over multiple chapters and combine them together. If you know of anyone who would like to collab on a project like this, I'd be happy to share my github repo.

Thanks dude.
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