Pericope: Scripture as written and read in antiquity

Searching the Pericope database (2)

If you would be interested in all cases where the Peshitta has a division independent of the LXX you might search for,

> PESH.+

which reads as: find all cases where `PESH', regardless of what follows, is the first witness after `> ' (note the space preceding PESH!).

If you want to find all cases where LXXA stands alone as a witness for some kind of punctuation you might enter,

LXXA +(hd|id|ld|[[:punct:]])$

which reads as: find the text `LXXA', followed by one or more (+) spaces, followed by any of the abbreviations `hd' or `id' or `ld' or any kind of punctuation, just before the end of a line ($).

If you would like to find all instances of a major division marking in a chapter or book or even the whole Bible, a possible approach would be to launch a multi-file search for

^md:

Since we wrote all instances of `md:' at the beginning of a line, this will provide you with a very fast overview. You can instantly open every file found to inspect the testimony.

Keep in mind that greps are case-sensitive and that many signs have a restricted meaning in a regular expression. If you want to use such signs in a literal sense, you have to put them behind a backslash (\).

Use your own imagination in developing search patterns like these. If you can combine grep searches with multi-file searching, also on unopened text files, this is one of the most powerful means to extract information from the records of the database. If you have written an interesting search pattern you are willing to share with other participants in the project, please send it to Marjo Korpel. After testing, she will distribute it among the other members of the group.

Unfortunately there are many slightly diverging `dialects' of grep and it is impossible to enumerate them all here. The examples given above are geared to BBEdit. For a BBEdit grep tutorial see: barebones.com or anybrowser.org. On the Internet you will find a wealth of further information on regular expressions. For our purposes Stuart Robinson's `Grep for Linguists' is a particularly helpful introduction.

Please look into the manual of your editor for specific possibilities and consult some literature on searching with regular expressions, e.g. Jeffrey E.F. Friedl, Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition, O'Reilley: Beijing, Cambridge, etc., 2002; Tony Stubblebine, Regular Expression Pocket Reference, O'Reilley: Beijing, Cambridge, etc., 2003.

 

[ Home ] [ News ] [ Pericope series ] [ Previous page ] [ Next page ] [ Contact ]

[ Pericope database ] [ Prerequisites ] [ Description of the new structure proposed ]
[ Sample from a column image ] [ Sample from a page of a codex ] [ Example of a text record ]
[ Searching the Pericope Database (1) ] [ Provisional List of Participants in the Pericope Database Project ]