This script uses BibleGateway.com's wonderful passage lookup tool to find a passage and turn it into Markdown usable in other ways.
The Markdown output includes:
- passage reference
- version abbreviation
- sub-headings
- passage text
Optionally it also includes:
- verse (and chapter) numbers
- footnotes
- cross-references
- copyright info
The output also gets copied to the clipboard.
When the 'Lord' is shown with small caps (in OT), it is output as 'LORD'.
When the original is shown red letter (i.e. the words of Jesus), this can be rendered in bold in the Markdown output, with the --boldwords option.
Chapters and verses can optionally be prefixed with markdown H5 and H6 headers respectively, using the --newline option.
Check you have installed the necessary gems (colorize, optparse, and clipboard) -- for example run gem install colorize or sudo gem install colorize etc.).
Add the .rb script to your PATH, and then set it as executable (chmod 755 bg2md.rb).
Usage: bg2md.rb [options] reference
(or, depending on your ruby installation, ruby bg2md.rb [options] reference)
It passes 'reference' through to the BibleGateway parser to work out what range of verses should be included. This gives lots of flexibility, for example Jn 3.16, John 3:16\ and jn3:16 all return the same verse. The reference term is concatenated to remove spaces, meaning it doesn't need to be 'quoted' on the command line. You can specify a verse range e.g. Jn 3.16-17 or even across chapters, e.g. 1 Cor 12.31-13.13. NB: This does not yet support multiple separate passages; instead just run for each passage separately.
The following options are available:
| Option | Option (longer form) | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| -b | --boldwords | Make the words of Jesus in markdown bold |
| -c | --copyright | Exclude copyright notice from output |
| -e | --headers | Exclude editorial headers from output |
| -f | --footnotes | Exclude footnotes from output |
| -h | --help | Show help |
| -i | --info | Show information as I work |
| -l | --newline | Start chapters and verses on a new line that starts with an H5 or H6 heading |
| -n | --numbering | Exclude verse and chapter numbers from output |
| -r | --crossrefs | Exclude cross-refs from output |
| -t | --test FILENAME | Pass HTML from FILENAME instead of live lookup. 'reference' must still be given, but will be ignored. |
| -v | --version VERSION | Select Bible version to lookup using BibleGateway's abbreviations (default:NET) |
e.g. Alfred -- tbd
- This is not affiliated to, or approved by, BibleGateway.com
- It's to be used in place of the very common usage of lookup-and-then-copy-and-paste the Bible text into a word processor
- The web pages produced by BibleGateway.com are full of cruft: less than 5% is typically the actual Bible text.
- The internal structure of the Bible text returned varies significantly from version to version. It also changes from time to time without notice. So if things look odd, it may be because there has been a periodic change which I'm not yet aware of.
- This is only tested on a few significant English versions that I use myself (NIV, NIVUK, NLT, ESV, MSG).
- I've not done any Internationalisation of this; I don't have the experience, but I'm willing to be helped by others here.
If you spot problems, or have requests for improvement, please raise an issue at the bg2md GitHub repository. Please give details on what calls you make, and what OS and version you're using, and the version of the ruby install.