This is a small python script I developed as a personal project for learning the basics of programming and helping me and some colleagues that are studying sanskrit at São Paulo, Brasil. For a long time we were trying to make some fast transliterations of texts for quoting in papers, articles and even class' handouts and although there are many transliterators available online, I felt the need of trying by myself to implement one and share it.
L-oṃ is a script converter module for Classical Sanskrit Devanāgarī (which means it still have no accentuation nor modern Indian languages' phonemes and graphemes) written in Python 3. It has the following ways:
- Harvard-Kyoto to Devanāgarī
- Harvard-Kyoto to IAST
- IAST to Devanāgarī
- Devanāgarī to IAST
Although I suppose it's quite useless, there are also the methods:
- Devanāgarī to Harvard-Kyoto
- IAST to Harvard-Kyoto
Dealing with strings proved to be quite hard when I was starting (when I first coded the L-oṃ, I was leaning python for a couple of weeks), so many of the solutions here are -excuse my portuguese- "gambiarras" -- and I guess "hack" translates that. Basically, for each way of moving either the sanskrit devanāgarī to a roman-script, either from IAST/Harvard-Kyoto to the itself nāgarī, I build a dictionary correlating the input system to the output system in its Unicode. The script breaks the input string in a list, walks it item by item and, while checking its environment, chooses from a set of dictionaries which character to append in a output list that is then joined into a string and finally printet or saved into a .txt. Which means that most of the code is dedicated to if-statements checking if there's or not a vowel or consonant before the letter being transliterated, if there must be a virāma etc.
At the first moment, I made one script for each way of converting, so there are 6 individual modules with the proper dictionaries and functions. I kept them updated with my new additions. But the lom.py script is working fine.
Finally there is a textual_converter.py file which converts any text file (usually .txt). It still interacts only by terminal with the user.
The run.py script it comes with is a tool that I wrote mostly for fast tests and some daily uses, basically, writing articles and handouts. It works with the Gtk modules, and I tested it only in my Ubuntu.