matthewjholmes/ipa-rest-api

International Phonetic Alphabet RESTful API for words

ipa-rest-api

International Phonetic Alphabet RESTful API for words

This project will consist of creating a REST API that will provide 2 things

• Return the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
• Return the phonetic equivalent of a word

As a reference we will use the IPA Alphabet listed on wikipedia :

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_French

We will also use collinsdictionary.com in order to obtain the phonetic result of a word.

How do I get set up?

1. Make sure you have Node JS installed (Download here: https://nodejs.org/en/download/current/)
2. Make sure you have Redis installed (Download here: http://redis.io/download)
3. Clone the repo into chosen directory and move to that directory
4. Run the following commands

npm install
redis-cli < data/alphabet_import.sh

5. Launch the Redis client using redis-cli and add a secret key that will be used for the JSON Web Tokens :

SET jwt:secret <enter secret key here>

6. Generate a JSON Web Token by running the following command with a desired email (This way you can restrict the API usage in order to prevent abuse)

node scripts/token.js <enter email address>

The tokens and their information will be stored in redis, you can see the list of keys by accessing the set with name jwt:tokens.

7. Start the app server by running the following command :

node server.js

8. You can make API calls in order to retrieve information. Make sure to add Authorization key to the header with the value Bearer <token> (Bearer, followed by a space, followed by your token.)

Example :

$ curl -X GET  http://localhost:3000/ipa/en/hello -H 'Authorization: Bearer <token>'
{"language":"en","word":"hello","phonetic":"heloʊhɛˈləʊ,"}

API

Alphabet

GET localhost:3000/alphabet/fr

Which returns :

[
  {
    "IPA": "e",
    "Examples": "clé, les, chez, aller, pied, journée",
    "Type": "Oral vowels"
  },
  {
    "IPA": "s",
    "Examples": "sans, ça, assez",
    "Type": "Consonants"
  },
  {
    "IPA": "ˈ",
    "Examples": "moyen [mwaˈjɛ̃]",
    "Type": "Suprasegmentals"
  },
  ...

IPA

GET localhost:3000/ipa/fr/ordinateur

Which returns :

{
  "language": "fr",
  "word": "ordinateur",
  "phonetic": "ɔʀdinatœʀ"
}

For local development, if you don't want to perform points 1 & 2, I experimented with Otto as a development tool (You can download it here : https://www.ottoproject.io/downloads.html). I was able to make the development environnment work following the following commands : https://github.com/hashicorp/otto/issues/496#issuecomment-230084747

Then if you ssh in the vagrant machine, you can basically execute the rest of the steps in the vagrant.

• Dependencies

All the package dependencies are located in package.json file

Authors

Alain Lormil created the IPA Rest API.

License

Copyright (c) 2015 Alain Lormil
Licensed under the MIT license.