whatlanguage

by Peter Cooper

Text language detection. Quick, fast, memory efficient, and all in pure Ruby. Uses Bloom filters for aforementioned speed and memory benefits.

Works with Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Italian, Pinyin, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish and Spanish out of the box.

Important note

This library was first built in 2007 and has received a few minor updates over the years. There are now more efficient and effective algorithms for doing language detection which I am investigating for a WhatLanguage 2.0.

This library has been updated to be distributed and to work on modern Ruby implementations but other than that, has had no improvements.

Synopsis

Full Example

require 'whatlanguage'

texts = []
texts << %q{Deux autres personnes ont été arrêtées durant la nuit}
texts << %q{The links between the attempted car bombings in Glasgow and London are becoming clearer}
texts << %q{En estado de máxima alertaen su nivel de crítico}
texts << %q{Returns the object in enum with the maximum value.}
texts << %q{Propose des données au sujet de la langue espagnole.}
texts << %q{La palabra "mezquita" se usa en español para referirse a todo tipo de edificios dedicados.}
texts << %q{اللغة التي هي هذه؟}
texts << %q{Mitä kieltä tämä on?}
texts << %q{Ποια γλώσσα είναι αυτή;}
texts << %q{באיזו שפה זה?}
texts << %q{Milyen nyelv ez?}
texts << %q{이 어떤 언어인가?}
texts << %q{Hvilket språk er dette?}
texts << %q{W jakim języku to jest?}

texts.each { |text| puts "#{text[0..18]}... is in #{text.language.to_s.capitalize}" }

Initialize WhatLanguage with all filters

wl = WhatLanguage.new(:all)

Return language with best score

wl.language(text)

Return hash with scores for all relevant languages

wl.process_text(text)

Convenience method on String

"This is a test".language   # => "English"

Initialize WhatLanguage with certain languages

wl = WhatLanguage.new(:english, :german, :french)

Requirements

None, minor libraries (BloominSimple and BitField) included with this release.

Installation

gem install whatlanguage

To test, go into irb, then:

require 'whatlanguage'
"Je suis un homme".language

## Credits

Contributions from Konrad Reiche and Salimane Adjao Moustapha appreciated.

License

MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.