# zdic-cli

An alternative, offline, regex-supporting, command-line interface to [zdic (漢典)](zdic.net), featuring:

- No internet connection required
- Full text search with regex: a command for finding characters/phrases in body text of definitions.
- Colorful text for highlighting entries


![](screenshots/screen000.png)
![](screenshots/screen001.png)
![](screenshots/screen002.png)
![](screenshots/screen003.png)
![](screenshots/screen004.png)


## Downloads

Standalone version available for windows, mac and linux. Please refer to the Releases page.

## Usage

zdic-cli runs as a REPL loop, and there are 5 types of commands you can enter:

```
def 甲        display entry for 甲
pre 甲        list words that starts with 甲
has 甲 乙 ... list words that contains 甲 and 乙 ...
txt 甲        list words whose full entry text contains 甲 (regex supported)
sel n         display entry at previously returned list index n
```

`def` is probably the most common one for simply looking up characters/words. `pre` `has` `txt` will return an enumerated list listing all elligible entries, and `sel 0`/`sel 1`/`sel n` can be used to select from the list.


## Development setup

**This section is for compiling from source (and is somewhat complex), if you just would like to use the software, please check out the Releases page.**

### Dependencies

- node.js/npm
- python2. Tested on 2.7. It has to be python 2 instead of 3 because much of the data-processing work were done way back in a time when 2 was the norm. Sorry folks, but if you're a python3 purist feel free to send a PR!
- pkg (optional, to build standalone binaries for multiple platforms) `npm install -g pkg`

### Downloading and compiling the dictionary files

This repo does not contain the dictonary files themselves as they're too large. Instead, a shell script (`setup.sh`) is provided to automate the process:

- Automatically download the original Kindle dictionary format (.PRC) from the internet. The download link hardcoded in `setup.sh` might fail in the future, in which case a google search for `汉典.prc` should yield alternative resources.
- Automatically download a python library (kroo/mobi-python) for parsing mobi files. A rather old library and have some oddities, a find-and-replace script will be automatically run to patch some glitches in the source code :P
- `python/to_txt.py` is run to extract a raw `txt` file from the kindle format `prc`.
- `phthon/to_json.py` is run to generate a directory of `json` files from the `txt` to make lookup and formatting more efficient.

Run the shell script with:

```
sh setup.sh
```

At this point you'll have `zdic.prc`, `zdic.txt` and directory `zdic_json/`. Only `zdic_json` is needed, so if everything went well with the script, you can freely delete the other two and gain some 700MB of free space :)

### Compiling the binary

At this point you can also run the software by simply doing:

```
node index.js
```

You can also package it into a binary using

```
pkg .
```

provided you have the node and pkg dependencies installed.

Tip: to run the software by typing `zdic` anywhere, you can symlink it to `/user/bin`, e.g.

```
ln -s /user/bin/zdic path/to/zdic-cli/zdic-cli
```