Say you want to get a sutta translation or root text that has been created in the Bilara segmentation system. As long as you have a correct citation (aka uid) and you know the name of the translator or name of the root text then you can easily fetch the text you want.
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Requesting a translation text
Pattern:
https://suttacentral.net/api/bilarasuttas/<uid>/<translator-id>
Example URL: https://suttacentral.net/api/bilarasuttas/sn7.5/sujato
Returns:
html_text:{
An object of the html wrapper for each segment. Keys are the segments. E.g.:
sn7.5:2.1 "<blockquote class='gatha'><p><span class='verse-line'>{}</span>"
The translation and/or root text should be inserted in place of the {} pair.
}
reference_text:{
An object of the manuscript references for each segment, when they exist. Keys are the segments ids. E.g.:
sn7.5:1.1: "cck15.220, ms12S1_1159, ā¦191, pts-vp-pli1ed1.165"
}
root_text:{
An object of the root text (e.g. PÄli) for each segment. Keys are the segments ids. E.g.:
sn7.5:2.4:"manasÄ ca na hiį¹sati; "
Segments should always end with a blank space.
}
translation_text:{
An object of the translation text (e.g. English) for each segment. Keys are the segments ids. E.g.:
sn7.5:2.1: "āIf you were really like your name, "
Segments should always end with a blank space.
}
keys_order:[
An array of all the segment ids in the correct sort order. E.g.:
["sn7.5:0.1", "sn7.5:0.2", "sn7.5:0.3", ...]
]
Requesting a root text
If you would like to request only the root text, you need to know the id for that text.
https://suttacentral.net/api/bilarasuttas/<uid>/<text-id>
For example the PÄli text id is ms.
Example URL: https://suttacentral.net/api/bilarasuttas/sn7.5/ms
This returns the same information as the previous example but without the translation_text.
Errors
If there is no matching text, the following will be returned:
msg: "Not Found"
If an invalid translator or root text id is given, only html_text, reference_text, root_text and keys_order is returned.
Parameters
At present, the lang=en, etc., parameter is only used as a reserved parameter and will not affect the query result.
Code Examples
Once you have fetched the data, the following code could be used to build an html string for presenting the translation with root text. It is good to handle the situation where a segment could be undefined in either the root or translation text. The code below shows two different ways of doing this. For the translation_text[segment] it is done with an if statement. For the root_text it is done with a conditional (ternary) operator.
let html="";
keys_order.forEach(segment => {
if (translation_text[segment] === undefined) {
translation_text[segment] = "";
}
let [openHtml, closeHtml] = html_text[segment].split(/{}/);
html += `${openHtml}<span class="segment" id ="${segment}"><span class="pli-lang" lang="pi">${
root_text[segment] ? root_text[segment] : ""
}</span><span class="eng-lang" lang="en">${translation_text[segment]}</span></span>${closeHtml}\n\n`;
});
Example projects
- SC Light (Github) uses this API as well as the SuttaPlex API
- Random Sutta Getter (Github)
