Release of text-validator 0.3

A few weeks ago, I announced the first release of text-validator, my pluggable command-line tool for validating the formatting and orthography of text files.

Since then I’ve done a couple of small updates.

In 0.2, I added a validator plugin to test tokens against a list of regular expressions. This is great for catching stray characters.

For example, here’s the configuration I use for my text of the Enchiridion:

TOKEN_REGEXES = [
    "\\d+\\.\\d+$",
    "[«(]*[\u0370-\u03FF\u1F00-\u1FFF]+\u2019?[.,:;»)]*$",
]

In 0.3, I made a small but significant change: the tool now returns a non-zero status code if validation fails. This doesn’t make much difference if you’re just running the tool manually on the command-line but if you’re running it as part of a continuous integration (CI) process, this is vital.

With the 0.3 change, I was able to set up a GitHub Action on both the apostolic-fathers and enchridion repos to automatically run text-validator any time there is a new push or pull request.

You can read more about text-validator and how to use it at https://github.com/jtauber/text-validator and the linked-to wiki pages.

at the intersection of computing, linguistics, philology, and learning science

By day I’m an entrepreneur, web technologist and open-source developer but my academic background is in linguistics (along with some classics, comparative philology, and educational statistics) and my main avocation is working on text, annotations, analysis and software relating to historical languages with a particular interest in facilitating better learning.

While my focus has mostly been on Biblical Greek, much of the work is highly relevant to other Hellenistic Greek texts, other dialects of Ancient Greek and, indeed, texts in completely different languages as well.

All code written for this endeavour is open source and text and data is made available under a Creative Commons license to the extent allowed by the sources used.