5.3 Gcide

The gcide module provides support for GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English. This dictionary can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcide. It consists of a set of files named from CIDE.A through CIDE.Z, written using a special markup. See http://gcide.gnu.org.ua, for a detailed information about the dictionary.

The gcide module is started via the following statement:

load-module gcide;

The database is initialized as follows:

database {
    handler "gcide dbdir=directory [options]";
    ...
}

The ‘dbdir’ parameter supplies the name of the directory where database files are located. Upon startup, the module scans the dictionary files and creates an index file, named GCIDE.IDX, if it does not already exist. The file is created using an ancillary program idxgcide, described below. Unless specified otherwise, this file is created in the same directory where the database files are located, therefore the directory must be writable for the user dicod is started as.

Other options are:

gcide parameter: html ¶

Enables HTML output. To request results in HTML, the client must issue OPTION MIME command.

gcide parameter: idxdir directory ¶

Specifies the directory where the CIDE.IDX index file resides or should reside.

gcide parameter: index-cache-size size ¶

Sets the maximum number of index pages the module keeps in memory simultaneously. The default value is 16. The pages are cached using the last recently used algorithm. Raising this value will make dictionary accesses faster at the expense of using more memory.

gcide parameter: index-program progname ¶

Specifies the full name of the index program. Usually this option is not needed, because the module is configured to start the idxgcide utility from its default location. It is mostly useful for the module developers.

gcide parameter: watch ¶

Watch for modifications in the dictionary corpus. If any of the dictionary files is modified, recreate the index file. Use this option if you expect to update dictionary files often.

gcide parameter: suppress-pr ¶

This parameter suppresses the output of ‘pr’ (pronunciation) tags. According to GCIDE docs, very few of the pronunciation fields have been filled in, so it might be reasonable to avoid displaying them at all.

Starting from version 0.51, GCIDE contains the file INFO, which provides basic information about the dictionary. The gcide module returns contents of this file at the ‘SHOW INFO’ request. The first line of this file (with the trailing newline and final point removed) is returned as the short database description.

Here’s a full example of a ‘gcide’ as used in ‘dico.gnu.org.ua’:

load-module gcide;

database {
    name "gcide";
    handler "gcide dbdir=/var/dictdb/gcide-0.51 suppress-pr";
    languages-from "en";
    languages-to "en";
}

• idxgcide