Where can I download a HTML version of Ajahn Brahmali's Vinaya Translations?

Q & A
1

Hello all, especially Ajahn @brahmali …

Can anybody tell me where\how can I download copies of Ajahn Brahmali’s Vinaya translations in HTML or E-book format?

All I can find on Github are translations by Horner with supplementary translations by Ajahn Brahmali. The translations I’m after are “live” on Sutta Central so it’s hopefully just finding out where they are stored.

Thanks.

Tom

2 Likes
2

Unfortunately, it’s not stored anywhere as html. If you want html, then you need to generate it using the bilara i/o app from the github repository. Would that be something you could do?

3

Hi @Snowbird … thanks for your response.

I’ve got no idea how to use the bilara i/o app but am happy to learn and have an IT background. Are there any instructions? I’ll share the converted files if I manage to generate the HTML versions.

Thanks again,

Tom

1 Like
4

We do have HTML files that correspond to Ajahn Brahmali’s Vinaya translations, but they are combined with other files to create the pages you see in the SuttaCentral webpage.

This is where the relevant files live in the SuttaCentral repos:
HTML: sc-data/sc_bilara_data/html/pli/ms/vinaya at master · suttacentral/sc-data · GitHub
Pali Vinaya texts: sc-data/sc_bilara_data/root/pli/ms/vinaya at master · suttacentral/sc-data · GitHub
Ajahn’s translations: sc-data/sc_bilara_data/translation/en/brahmali/vinaya at master · suttacentral/sc-data · GitHub

You could always use wget to scrape the pages and save them HTML. You might want to ask @sujato before doing that, though.

1 Like
5

Bilara i/o is the script that combines those three things into a file that can then be turned into html.

If you do a search for bilara i/o here you should be able to find Bhante’s instructions.

2 Likes
6

Cool! Didn’t know about that script.

Using wget would be one line of code that can be run from the command line that will recursively download all pages from a starting URL. So, that would be simplest. But, as I said, the polite thing to do would be to ask before doing that.

7

As I understand it, everything is CC0, so no need to ask. Create, create, create!

1 Like
8

I was thinking more from a technical perspective. Scraping a website can have a negative impact on the site’s performance.

1 Like
9

Indeed!

GitHub can take the traffic (which they provide free to open source projects) so that isn’t a concern either, as long as you’re “scraping” the GitHub files and not SuttaCentral.net.

But why scrape when you can download the whole thing in one go?

1 Like
10

I don’t think scraping the website will work. If you do a right click and show page source there is nothing really there.

1 Like
11

So I tried to process the whole bhikku vibhanga into an html file but my process choked.

Here is an example of what bilara i/o will output. It is a tsv file of the Bhikkhu parajika section.
https://ufile.io/rewxjkr5

What I do then is open it in excell and remove the last two columns. Then in notepad++ I run this regex:

Find: (.?)\t(.?)\t(.?)\t(.?){}(.*)
replace: \4\2\3\5

You get something serviceable. I’ll start working on an epub tomorrow.

12

Thanks @dayanbao, @Snowbird and @Khemarato.bhikkhu . As Snowbird said, the links kindly provided by dayanbao are to files in .json format and therefore require conversion into HTML. Apparently the conversion is accomplished using Bilara i\o but the instructions for using it assume a lot of skills (which I don’t have :-/ ). e.g.

I’m comfortable in Windoze but Bhante Sujato assumes a high level of competency in Linux. :frowning:

I have the tools to scrape the site if necessary but can’t see what that would accomplish as I’ve already got bilara-data downloaded to my PC. Converting .json to HTML remains the hurdle.

Snowbird, it seems you’ve successfully converted .json to HTML and then to .mobi. Are you using Windoze or Linux? Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

:anjal:

1 Like
13

I don’t have time now to explain, but I have for a long time wanted to write up the process Bhante helped me through. I am also on Windows. You have to setup python.

Here is the whole Bhikkhu Vibhanga tsv with the last two columns removed.
https://ufile.io/pd90jbsw

You then just need to do the regex I posted above and then you will have html.

It needs styling, though. Maybe that will give you enough to work with till I get the epub created.

4 Likes
14

Thanks Snowbird … that’s great! I just need the raw HTML so lack of styling is no problem. I look forward to seeing the epub.

1 Like
15

This is going to become interesting to me in a couple of months I think. It would certainly be very useful to have your notes and thoughts written up.

1 Like