[INDOLOGY] hack for searching Apte 1957–59 (Rev. and Exp.) online in IAST

[Tyler Neill]

Dear all,

I thought I would share this online dictionary hack I implemented today. If
you enter this URL...
skrutable.pythonanywhere.com/ChicagoApteIAST?query=rām
...in your browser, with your query in place of "rām" at the end there, you
can search Chicago's version of Apte Practical Sanskrit Dictionary 1957–59
(Revised and Expanded) by typing in IAST. I personally like to use this in
combination with Chrome's "custom search engine" functionality, for example.

Gory details:
The reason I had to implement this is that both the Cologne and Chicago
dictionary websites have recently made changes that, as far as I can tell,
make it more difficult to search this edition of Apte, which I like for its
additional references, and to do so comfortably in IAST. The Cologne site
seems to have simply stopped supporting this edition in its "simple-search"
interface (where it was formerly abbreviated "AP") and instead now relies
on the older 1890 edition ("AP90"). On the other hand, the Chicago site has
stopped respecting Roman diacritics, making precise searching possible only
in Devanagari. For this reason, the "skrutable" link provided above takes
care of transliterating from IAST to Devanagari and then redirects to the
Chicago site (along with "headword only" and "starts with" search options).
I still prefer Chicago over Cologne for Apte because, among other reasons,
the Cologne website design makes direct URL queries difficult unless
without the outer frame like this
<https://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/awork/apidev/listview.php?key=r%C4%81ma&output=roman&dict=AP&accent=no&input=roman>
—
note Apte 1957–59 still available there — and because it doesn't support
"starts with"-style output, instead privileging manual choice of full
lemmata from the search bar autocomplete dropdown.

If anyone else understands the situation differently, I'd be keen to know.
Also please let me know if you're interested in seeing this work
differently somehow.

Kind regards,
Tyler

<http://skrutable.pythonanywhere.com/ChicagoApteIAST?query=kart>
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