In addition to its robustness, Blast provides a high level of accuracy. It doesn’t dumbly
split words at spaces, nor does it split sentences at periods within words. It leverages UTF-
8 character sets for Latin alphabet languages, meaning that you can accurately apply it to
French, German, Spanish, English, Italian, and Portuguese content.
Suppose you used Blast’s sentence delimiter on the following paragraph. (Bold and
italic are used below to indicate the consecutive text matches that Blast detects.) Blast
correctly identified six sentences in the paragraph:
¿Will the sentence delimiter recognize this full sentence containing Spanish
punctuation? ¡Yes! « Mais, oui ! » “Nested “quotes” don’t break the sentence
delimiter!” Further, periods inside words (e.g. Blast.js), in formal titles (e.g. Mrs. Bluth,
Dr. Fünke), and in “e.g.” and “i.e.” do not falsely match as sentence-final punctuation.
Darn. That’s pretty impressive.
Notice how punctuation is associated with its proper sentence, and how errant periods
don’t falsely demarcate sentence matches.
With these foundations covered, it’s time to run through how to use Blast.
Installation
Blast is installed on a page like any other JavaScript plugin: embed the appropriate script
link before your page’s