Conman's Dictionary

A dictionary application for articial/constructed language enthusiasts.

---

Project maintained by umbraroze Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Long story short: Long ago, I made some really quick and dirty scripts that did various things.

And ever since, the fact that Perl scripts are used in this repository has haunted the GitHub statistics.

So in the end of 2025, I decided that I should not give false hope to people who were looking for a hardened Perl expert. I fear someone might say “ooo, this repository uses Perl – maybe it was written by a real Perl monk.” Truth is, I’ve not touched Perl in ages.

Plus these scripts really shouldn’t be paraded as, you know, useful things. These are pretty useless. But maybe they should be stuck somewhere just as historical thingies.

So here are the scripts that I originally stuck in the utils directory. If you really need these, look at the Markdown source at docs/oldscripts.md and copy-paste this stuff. Or something. These are pretty useless. I don’t think anyone needs these.

Some plain-text Unix dict tools will eventually appear in the C# version, at least I hope.

README

This directory contains random script files to handle conversions
from obsolete formats, and possibly to work with dictd-style dictionary
files. Note that these were pretty much developed for one-shot dealies
and are not particularly ingenious or well-tested. Unless otherwise
mentioned, the scripts in this directory are in public domain (not GPL3)
and you accept that you're using them entirely on your risk. -wwwwolf

dict2dictx.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
######################################################################
# This will convert a pair of dictionaries to Conman's Dictionary XML format.
#
# wwwwolf 2006-09-28
######################################################################

use strict;
use warnings;

our (%d);

my $word = '';
my $def = '';
while (<>) {
  chomp;
  next if($_ eq '');
  if(/^\s+/) {
    $def .= "$_\n";
  }
  else {
    if($word eq '') {
      $word = $_;
    } else {
      if(!exists $d{$word}) {
        $d{$word} = [];
      }
      push @{$d{$word}}, $def;
      $word = $_;
      $def = '';
    }
  }
}
if(!exists $d{$word}) {
  $d{$word} = [];
}
push @{$d{$word}}, $def;

foreach $word (sort keys %d) {
  foreach $def (@{$d{$word}}) {
    printf "<entry><term>$word</term><definition>$def</definition></entry>\n";
  }
}

dictsort.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
######################################################################
# This will sort a dictionary file that is in format
#
#   headline
#        definition blah blah...
#
#   headline
#        definition blah blah...
#
# And take into account that there can be multiple definitions with
# the same headword.
#
# wwwwolf 2006-09-11
######################################################################

use strict;
use warnings;

our (%d);

my $word = '';
my $def = '';
while (<>) {
  chomp;
  next if($_ eq '');
  if(/^\s+/) {
    $def .= "$_\n";
  }
  else {
    if($word eq '') {
      $word = $_;
    } else {
      if(!exists $d{$word}) {
        $d{$word} = [];
      }
      push @{$d{$word}}, $def;
      $word = $_;
      $def = '';
    }
  }
}
if(!exists $d{$word}) {
  $d{$word} = [];
}
push @{$d{$word}}, $def;

foreach $word (sort keys %d) {
  foreach $def (@{$d{$word}}) {
    printf "$word\n$def\n";
  }
}

reclassify-words.rb

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# Used to clean up old-style adhoc definitions to new-style word classes.

require 'rexml/document'

dictionary = REXML::Document.new(File.open(ARGV[0]))

dictionary.elements.each('//entry') do |e|
  t = e.elements['definition'].text
  if(t =~ /^(n|a|v|pr|p)\.\s+/)
    e.attributes['class'] = case $1
                            when 'n' then 'Noun'
                            when 'a' then 'Adjective'
                            when 'v' then 'Verb'
                            when 'pr' then 'Pronoun'
                            when 'p' then 'Particle'
                            end
    t.gsub!(/^(n|a|v|pr|p)\.\s+/,'')
    e.elements['definition'].text = t
  end
end
puts dictionary