dictionary hacking

Yes, I find your dictionary quite useful.

I have not tried to use regular expressions, though; it seems to figure out what I’m trying to spell every time.

The regexs were being used mostly for crosswords last time I checked. Maybe everyone has decided that’s cheating.

I probably use the dictionary a couple times a week. I have the following in my (Mozilla-based browser) bookmarks.

Name: dictionary Location: http://antiflux.org/dictionary?define=%s&strategy=* Keyword: d

So I can type “d foo” in my location bar to look up foo.

i still use it! and i was very sad when the regular expressions weren’t working. but they are now, so hooray! back to cheating at crosswords for me…

well geez. next time email me, stupid.

i did, remember? you told me how to use dict instead because it was broken.

which reminds me, you never did tell me what the syntax was for regular expressions…

Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 17:35:51 -0600
From: Grant Hollingworth 
To: Erin Lee 
Subject: Re: dictionary

* Erin Lee  [2003-09-24 16:58]:
> how do i use your dictionary to find words that match a certain length?
> like o______?

you use regular expressions, but that seems broken.  try the
command-line program 'dict'.

dict -m -s re '^o[a-z]{6}$'

that means: start of word, an o, 6 letters, end of word.

> i forget what the syntax is ...

you probably will again...

well fuck. now i feel really dumb.

you could try perldoc perlre, keeping in mind that not everything in perl regexs is present in posix regexs…

had I known your dictionary was so spectacular, I would have been using it. my icab address bar search used to go to http://dictionary.reference.com/search?db=*&q=, but now it goes to antiflux/dictionary. hooray.! for advertising-free antiflux.

if you’re feeling adventurous, an antiflux mirror of makeashorterlink.com would be handy, especially since antiflux is easier to type than makeashorterlink.

r.

r: tinyurl.com is good too.