dash creative, Fall 2017–Spring 2019
This dictionary from 1775 is truly hilarious. In order to include it in the Super Dictionary, I built a web scraper to collect dictionary entries found online. It used the nokogiri and mechanize gems. It traversed the online version of the dictionary that did not have an API and traversed entries by URL. These entries were dumped into a postgresql database and served via JSON.
Formatting large chunks of text into something suitable for a database was tricky, but I dove deep into regex to make it work.