Well, it’s just putting together existing technology. In the readMe I link to the library I used to do the diffing. And, of course, the suttas themselves are coming from the SuttaCentral API.
Much appreciation as always to Bhante @Sujato and his team for all their hard work. And to @Khemarato.bhikkhu for his help and patience with the coding.
The diffing library I’m using doesn’t provide for that (as far as I can tell). But anything is possible with code.
My thinking was that either the suttas would be so similar that it wouldn’t matter (assuming simple manual checking [aka eyeballing it] was not turning up the difference) or that they would be so different that aligning the line wouldn’t work.
Yes, your name came up right away when I was discussing this with Ven. Khemarato. This should kick your spotting of inconsistencies up to god like level.
I’m still working on getting other languages to work.
Well, usually I don’t quite know what I am comparing with. Sometimes I have a vague memory of a different translation of a certain passage, or what the (German) Bilara translation memory shows me differs from what I see in the English translation of the current Sutta—these are things that make me suspicious. But what the translation memory doesn’t show is where these other passages belong to. So I go searching … and my favorite tool is always @karl_lew’s scv-bilara. (Hopefully we’ll one day manage to build a nice user interface for it so that is is easier to use for anybody.)
But surely once my suspicion is concrete enough your new tool can be a great help to pin down the exact differences.
To come back to that one, just a possible use case:
In your link comparing MN 10 and DN 22, I see this passage:
I’d now be interested to know if the Pali in the two Suttas is different here or the same. If it’s the same, that would be a thing to point out to Bhante Sujato as an inconsistency. In order to find that out it would—especially when it comes to long Suttas—be easier if I could see the segment numbers of the two Sutta passages and then compare precisely these segments in Pali.
Is that too hard a coding task?
I would still assume that much is possible, but sometimes the relation between effort and benefit is just not fitting. So I leave that up to you.
I can always find that out by using a different tool, of course.
There are actually more differences in the Pali, mostly spelling variants. To find the right segments that I want to compare is not so easy in a long Sutta.
I don’t know. I just tried out the link you provided because it was here.
I translate short Suttas and long Suttas, so I compare short Suttas and long Suttas. Sometimes I compare passages of short Suttas with passages in long Suttas. All these cases happen.
But as I said, it’s quite likely that the effort is not worth the benefit. I can usually get the information I need by other means. Actually what I really like is the trilingual view in scv-bilara.