I want my contract to check that a claimed event was indeed logged.

Assuming I know how to follow a merkle path from a recent block and find the bit patterns of a log entry, how in solidity do I get the bit patterns from the claimed event object, so I may compare the two?

Also, how from the source code do I extract the topic and the bit pattern encoding, so I may do the same job from my client and server programs, outside of the contract itself?

PS: I suspect that at least part of the answer lies in the [Solidity ABI Spec](https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/abi-spec.html#events), but for the neophyte that I am, there is information or meta-information missing, such that I'm not sure how to interpret all that data. Examples and/or code would help.