Scripture Lookup Gem

Providers a clean interface to common scripture providers, such as Crossways ESV and Bible Gateway.

Current (default) provider is BibleGatewayScraper, which pulls back scripture from Bible Gateway.

This is a work in progress and all feedback or collaboration is welcome.

A screen-scrape interface to Bible Gateway has been implemented and provides (by far) the most comprehensive list of translations available.

The Crossways ESV API provider is a work in progress on the crossways branch.

gem install scripture_lookup
require 'scripture_lookup'

Shortcut to bring back a BibleGatewayScraper instance:

provider = ScriptureLookup.new

Example usage - #to_s to pull back the text only:

response = provider.lookup("John 3:16", :NASB)
response.to_s

=> "\“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life."

Example usage - #verses to pull back an array of verses

response = provider.lookup("1 Thess 5:16-18", :ESV)
response.verses

=> ["Rejoice always,",
    "pray without ceasing,",
    "give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you."]

The ScriptureLookup::Response object also gives access to the full response data, by way of the #response_data accessor.

• This is a fairly complicated collection of hashes and arrays.
• See comments in response.rb for the dirty details.

Installation of this gem includes a command line interface. To utilize, call "scripture , " from the command line.

defaults to "NASB" if none is provided.

The command line interface utilizes the Bible Gateway screen-scrape provider.

ex.

scripture "John 3:16", NASB
scripture "John 3:16"
scripture "Psalm 23", ESV
scripture "Rom 12:1-2", NIV

Taking a page from Avdi Grimm's Exceptional Ruby book, any errors that descend from StandardError are caught and wrapped in a namespaced error (ScriptureLookup::Error) before they are allowed to unwind back to the client application.

This is true of any public interface into the gem.

• Refactor CrosswaysEsvProvider to utilize the new Response object.
• Refactor the Response object's @response_data structure into something more object-oriented than the current hash of hashes/arrays.
• Obtain credentials and access to the new Bible Gateway API and implement a non-screen-scraped provider.