WHAT'S THIS?
-----------

mguesser is a standalone part of libmnogosearch (a core of mnogo search engine
http://www.mnogosearch.org) which allows to guess character set and language
of a text file.


mguesser is implemented using "N-Gram-Based Text Categorization" technique
which is implemented in TextCat language guesser written in Perl
(http://www.let.rug.nl/~vannoord/TextCat/). mguesser is significantly
faster than TextCat especially on large texts.


This package consist of C written N-gram based algorithms as well
as a number of maps for texts in various languages and character sets. 
Take a look into "maps" directory of this package to check the currently
supported languages and character sets.



INSTALLATION
------------

* Download source package from http://www.mnogosearch.org/guesser/
* Unpack the distribution
* Change directiry to the unpacked distribution, then type "make".

By default, mguesser will seek for language maps in "maps" subdirectory
of the current directory. You can change the default language map
location in Makefile by redefining the "-DLMDIR" value.



USAGE
-----


mguesser takes a plain text data to STDIN. Note that other "almost text" 
formats like HTML will return bad results. In later releases I'll possibly
add a command line switch to tell mguesser that the input data is HTML. 
mguesser works fine for texts with size starting from 500 bytes and longer.
Shorter texts are guessed not so well.

To guess language and character set of some text file use:

  mguesser < text_file

mguesser will display how much your file corresponds to various language
maps in the order of quality. mguesser returns values between 0 and 1.

You can also display a specified number of the best results using -n
command line switch. For example, this command will display 3 best results:

  mguesser -n3 < text_file

To make mguesser load language maps from a non-default directory, use:

  mguesser -d/path/to/maps/
  
To load language maps from multiple directories, use a colon separated list:

  mguesser -d/path/to/maps1/:/path/to/maps2/:/path/to/maps3/

To create a new language map, use:

  mguesser -p -c charset -l language < text_file

When executed with -p command line parameter, mguesser creates
a new language map built on text_file and prints it to STDOUT.
Please note that to create a high quality language map,
the source text file should be large enough. A 500 Kb text is
usually enough to produce a high quality map.


You can also include these files into your own applications.
Take a look into main() function which is located in the guesser.c to
check the order of guesser functions calls.



TODO
----

 * Make it possible to guess other than text formats: HTML, XML
 * Implement various command line switches to choose output format


Alexander Barkov <bar@mnogosearch.org>