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Sunday, May 19, 2002
How Shabdakosh is converted into Unicode!
By srinivas.annam @ 11:38 AM :: 1123 Views :: 0 Comments

Several users have sent us emails telling how impressed they are with Shabdakosh - the English to Hindi dictionary found at the following link:

http://www.aksharamala.com/hindi/e2h/

First of all, credit should go to the creators of Shabdakosh for creating such an excellent dictionary and for putting in the public domain. Of course, we do deserve some for our effort in converting the data into Unicode and for uploading it to a database so that it the entries can be searched easily.

Having converted the dictionary into Unicode we have thought that this would be of interest to Aksharamala users as well.

To try out this procedure, you would need to have the following software:

  1. Aksharamala 2002 Pro or later
    (preferably on Microsoft Windows XP or later platform with reasonable amount of memory)

  2. Microsoft Excel XP or later

  3. The Shabdakosh dictionary in ITRANS format.
    (The full dictionary can be found on the internet, for this procedure you can also use the attached sample file with 10 entries)

To convert the dictionary into Unicode:

  1. Open the dictionary (or attached shabdakosh.txt) in MS Excel 2002.
    - Delimited should be selected in the first screen
    - Under Delimiters section "Tab" should be selected
    - Text qualifier should be " (double quote)
    - Press Finish

  2. Now, select the data from third column and press Ctrl + C. (Although, there is no physical limit on how many rows can be copied to the clipboard, please select no more than 40-50 rows at any time)

  3. Now select Hindi -> Hindi Transliteration Scheme from Aksharamala and make sure it is enabled.

  4. Press Ctrl + Shift + I (the hotkey for paste-literate)

  5. At this point data in the 3rd column should be converted to Hindi.

Select menu item File -> Save As. Change the formatting to "Unicode Text (*.txt)" and give a new file name. Press Yes when Excel asks "... Do you want to keep the workbook in this format?"

At this point the data in the saved text file is ready to be imported into MS Access / SQL Server or any other Unicode compatible database program. You can even export the data into non-Unicode database programs (provided they support 8-bit ASCII) as long as you know the right tools.

Let us know your feedback on how this article is useful using "Rate this thread" feature.

Click here to download the sample file 

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