World of Wonder (WoW) was a British weekly educational magazine for kids, published between 1970 and 1975, and running for over 250 issues. It contained articles on a wide variety of topics, from 'Abelard and Heloise' to the Zulu wars. It was quite similar to Look and Learn, and ultimately merged with that magazine at the end of its run. More historical details can be found at the Look and Learn Archive site.
One similariry with "Look and Learn" was the periodic publication of topic indicies. As with my Look and Learn Indicies page, I've scanned them in, cleaned up the text, and produced 9 text files. These can be searched using any tool you like (e.g. grep), but I've put together three small Python programs to help.
Disclaimer: OCR can be inaccurate even with the best of input images. I've tried to correct all the errors, but it's a certainty that I've missed some. If you find any, please send me a quick e-mail and I'll update the material here. Thanks.
Search all of the indicies, using a regular expression pattern, printing the matching lines. A "-f" option includes the file name and line number of each match. A "-c" makes upper/lowercase significant in the regex; by default, case is ignored.
Some examples to try:
python search.py "first" # upper or lower case
python search.py "Charles I+"
python search.py "Charles I+" -f
python search.py "(Thai)|(Siam)"
python search.py "Art"
python search.py "series"
python search.py "Shark" # upper or lower case
python search.py "Shark" -c # case matters
Some output:
> python search.py "(Thai)|(Siam)" Princess Chalow, Siamese spy, 90 Rose of Lamp'un, princess spy of Siam, 90 Teak, wood from Thailand, 81 Thailand, teak production, 81 Bhumibol, King of Thailand, 113 Bhumibol, King of Thailand, 113 Siam, Loy Krathong festival, 125 Thailand, festival of Loy Krathong, 125 Siamese fighting fish, 154 Siamese fighting fish, 154 Bangkok, Thailand capital, 219 Leonowens, Anna, governess to King of Siam, 226 Siam, King and governess Anna, 226 Matches: 13
The only significant change in the data from the Look and Learn Indicies is that matching issue numbers are given rather than issue dates. For example, King Bhumibol was described in issue no. 113. You can find the corresponding date by calling issueToDate.py, as shown below.
These scripts convert from a publication date to an issue number, and vice-versa. Some examples:
> python dateToIssue.py Enter a date (dd MMM yyyy or MMM dd yyyy): 24 Mar 1972 Issue on 18 Mar 1972, no. 104 Not a publication date. Previous issue is 104 on 18 Mar 1972 > python issueToDate.py Enter an issue number: 113 Issue on 18 Mar 1972, no. 104 The issue appeared on: 20 May 1972