Books of Bible with Chapter Reference

I could use some advice on how best to solve my problem here…

I have a tiddler for each book of the bible. On other tiddlers, if it’s referencing a book, I’ll just link to the book tiddler.

For example, I have a tiddler called BookOfRomans. I have another tiddler that references BookOfRomans like such:

"[[BookOfRomans]] 6:8 says “If we have died with Christ, so shall we also live with him”

It can also be said: If we are to live with him, then we must die with him. First death-then life.

But when? Indeed, when the first has happened, because the coming of the life-giving [[HolySpirit]] is the same as the coming of the “Comforter” whom Christ has promised to the disciples. When does the Comforter come? He does not come until all the dreadful things that Christ has prophesied about his life have happened, and likewise the appalling things he has predicted regarding the lives of the disciples-then comes the Comforter. Whether he comes that very moment is not said; it merely says that it will happen when the first has happened, when this dying has occurred. So it is with the coming of the life-giving Spirit."

This is great as I can go to the BookOfRomans tiddler and can view all the tiddlers that reference it. The issue, however, is I don’t have an easy way of seeing specific chapters tiddlers are referencing. I’d love to be able to go to the BookOfRomans tiddler and see a list of chapters that tiddlers reference to. For instance,

  • 1:3
    – Tiddler A
  • 6:8
    – Tiddler B

Something like that. And right now, my thought is to have some form of regex used to accomplish this, as every reference follows the specific format of [[BookName]] Chapter:Verse, so somehow I could loop through each tiddler that links to the book and then find the digits that follow immediately after the literal link.

Open to suggestions on alternatives and/or how I could accomplish the regex extraction.

Although I enjoy “programming” in TiddlyWiki something silly …

I am a huge fan of “componentization”.

Tiddler links in TW are easy, and backlinks are easy, and filtering links (I.e. tiddler titles) is easy.

I would suggest that any thing you want to reference via a link, make that thing a tiddler.

If you have a big tiddler with chapters of text in the body, excise the chapters into their own tiddlers. Transclude those chapters in your book tiddlers, and create links to chapters (instead of creating links to some part of a tiddler’s body.)

To me, that is less of a maintenance headache, and reduces risks of performance bottlenecks.

@DaveGifford has done a lot of Bible work. Have a quick forum search.

I’d also recommend taking a look at @Scott_Sauyet’s work with the KJV. He’s using the approach Charlie recommended, with chapters assembled from verses stored in individual tiddlers.

These are great! Definitely going to look at these.

If I was to go down the hierarchical route, is there a way to be able to look at the BookOfRomans, for instance, and view all the tiddlers that link to its children? For instance, if I have two tiddlers that link to BookOfRomans 1, I’d love to be able to see that when viewing BookOfRomans.

What about something like this?

  1. If it is not too great a task at this point (I have no idea how many notes you have with links to the Bible), you could change your existing links to [[BookOfRomans 1:13]] rather than [[BookOfRomans]] 1:13. It’s just a matter of sliding the end brackets over for each instance. And for the following step to work, you would need to create tiddlers for those verse links. Just press the links to create the tiddlers, and save the tiddlers.

Obviously, you don’t need to create a tiddler for each of the verses of the Bible, just the ones that you create in the process of changing the format.

  1. In [[BookOfRomans]], insert <$list filter="[prefix:title[BookOfRomans]]"><$link/><br><span class="indent1"><$list filter="[all[current]backlinks[]]"><$link/><br></$list></span></$list>. The outer list shows links to all verse tiddlers, that is, all tiddlers that start with BookOfRomans. Each entry will then have its own list, of the tiddlers that backlink to it. Output would look like you asked for:

[[BookOfRomans 1:3]]
– [[Tiddler A]]
[[BookOfRomans 6:8]]
– [[Tiddler B]]

There would be no dashes. The dashes are there because I don’t see an indent button in Talk TW. Rather, Tiddlers A and B would be indented.

  1. From Documenting TW — a non-linear personal web notebook drag the link found there into your file so that the indenting part of the snippet above indents correctly

Thanks, @etardiff. I’d also look at the followup working with multiple translations. As with so much of my wikis, these are all works in progress.

The approach I use is to build chapters out of verses, and books out of chapters. So each book, chapter, and verse is directly linkable:

We could easily then add footer templates for Books, Chapters, and Verses to list anything which links to these items:

title: $:/_/bible-wiki/templates/verse/footer
tags: $:/tags/ViewTemplate

<% if [<currentTiddler>tag{$:/language/plugins/crosseye/bible-wiki/Verse}] %>
<% if [<currentTiddler>backlinks[]count[]!match[0]] %>

<br/>

----------
!!! Linking here
<<list-links filter:"[<currentTiddler>backlinks[]]" >>
<% endif %>
<% endif %>

And of course we could also write more sophisticated lists such as the one @DaveGifford suggested.

To see this in action on one of my bible wikis, you can download the following and dragging it to a sample bible wiki:

BibleFooterBacklinks.json (1.6 KB)

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