Script to print entries from the Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM (v.4.0) to terminal. This eliminates the need to use the Flash-based executable included in the CD-ROM to view the contents. Note that this repository does NOT include any content from the dictionary's entries: it is only a helper script for viewing entries from a legally purchased copy of the Oxford English Dictionary CD-ROM.
Put oed.py and oeda.py into the root directory of the dictionary and run the command:
./oed.py [entry]
Where [entry] is the search query. Use -i for interactive mode and -w to set the output column width (recommended if using interactive mode).
Dictionary entries are contained in Zlib-compressed blocks (1066 total) in the 196MB file oed.t. Blocks are located at fixed offsets defined as integer constants in the Neko bytecode file app.n. The Zlib magic (78 DA) at the start of each block was originally overwritten with a random 16-bit value. This and the offsets were discovered in a bytecode dump of app.n using the Neko Compiler nekoc.
Entites, HTML-based representations of non-ASCII symbols, are defined in the script file EntityMapper.as compiled into the Flash executable OED.swf. The script file was extracted from the Flash executable using the JPEXS Free Flash Decompiler and the entities were copied to oeda.py.