Dictionary references: Is there an easy way?

[Hanlink]

If I have a great deal of text in electronic format for which I need to find the page or individual character references for ALL the characters using different dictionaries such as 辭海 or Matthews or the 康熙字典 or Karlgren or the 漢語大字典. I know that Wenlin has references for some of these dictionaries, but I would need to go into each character separately and then copy the reference. I was hoping that there might be some programme out there that might make it easier, at least for some of the dictionaries.

Any ideas / help much appreciated.

[renzhe]

What I did (for studying characters, but also to help generate the word lists for the Grand Episode project) was to make a few scripts that go through a text and look up each character in CEDICT and write the definition into a new file.

I don't know the format of these other dictionaries, so I don't know how difficult it would be to adapt it to use them.

[imron]

The unihan database contains dictionary positions for several dictionaries:

# Positions in the four dictionaries used by the IRG

* KangXi Zidian, 7th edition (1989). Peking: Zhonghua Bookstore.

* Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, revised edition (1986). Tokyo: Taishuukan Shoten.

* Hanyu Da Zidian, 1st edition (1986). Chengdu: Sichuan Cishu Publishing.

* Dae Jaweon, 1st edition (1988). Seoul: Samseoung Publishing Co., Ltd.

# (I) Positions in other commonly-used dictionaries

* Nelson

* Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary by Robert H. Mathews, Cambrige: Harvard University Press, 1975.

* The Student's Cantonese-English Dictionary, third edition, by Bernard F. Meyer and Theodore F. Wempe, Hong Kong: the Catholic Truth Society-Hong Kong, 1978.

* A Practical Cantonese-English Dictionary, by Sidney Lau, Hong Kong: The Government Printer, 1977.

If you have any programming or scripting skills, it probaby wouldn't be too difficult to get something working that produced the dictionary reference for a character. In fact, Chinese Perakun uses information from the Unihan database, so it could probably be easily modified to have this information (if you know your way around Javascript that is).

[Hanlink]

Dear Imron,

That is a very good lead - perhaps I need to bone up on Javascript to get what I want, but if it works... yippee!

Many Thanks!