Installation and Configuration

Installation and Configuration

Installation

Install natto-py as you would any other Python package:

$ pip install natto-py

This will automatically install cffi as a dependency.

Automatic Configuration

As long as the mecab (and mecab-config for *nix and Mac OS) executables are on your PATH, natto-py should not require any explicit configuration.

• On *nix and Mac OS, it queries mecab-config to discover the path to the libmecab.so or libmecab.dylib, respectively.
  • mecab-config --libs will display the library directory and name.
• On Windows, it queries the Windows Registry to locate the MeCab installation folder.
• In order to convert character encodings to/from Unicode, natto-py will examine the charset of the mecab system dictionary.
  • mecab -D will show the system dictionary information, including file name and charset (character encoding).

Explicit configuration via MECAB_PATH and MECAB_CHARSET

If natto-py for some reason cannot locate the mecab library, or if it cannot determine the correct charset used internally by mecab, then you will need to set the MECAB_PATH and MECAB_CHARSET environment variables.

• Set the MECAB_PATH environment variable to the exact name/path to your mecab library.
• Set the MECAB_CHARSET environment variable if you compiled mecab and the related dictionary to use a non-default character encoding.

e.g., for Mac OS:

export MECAB_PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/mecab/0.996/lib/libmecab.dylib
export MECAB_CHARSET=utf8

e.g., for bash on UNIX/Linux:

export MECAB_PATH=/usr/local/lib/libmecab.so
export MECAB_CHARSET=euc-jp

e.g., on Windows:

set MECAB_PATH=C:\Program Files\MeCab\bin\libmecab.dll
set MECAB_CHARSET=shift-jis

e.g., from within a Python program on *nix::

import os

os.environ['MECAB_PATH']='/usr/local/lib/libmecab.so'
os.environ['MECAB_CHARSET']='utf8'

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