PYCLD2 - Python Bindings to CLD2

Python bindings for the Compact Langauge Detect 2 (CLD2).

This package contains forks of:

• The cld2 C++ library, developed by Dick Sites
• The chromium-compact-language-detector C++ extension module, originally created by Mike McCandless, which has been modified post-fork. These bindings, among other changes, make the support of over 165 languages the default.

The goal of this project is to consolidate the upstream library with its bindings, so the user can pip install one package instead of two.

The LICENSE is the same as Chromium's LICENSE and is included in the LICENSE file for reference.

Installing

$ python -m pip install -U pycld2

Example

import pycld2 as cld2

isReliable, textBytesFound, details = cld2.detect(
    "а неправильный формат идентификатора дн назад"
)

print(isReliable)
# True
details[0]
# ('RUSSIAN', 'ru', 98, 404.0)

fr_en_Latn = """\
France is the largest country in Western Europe and the third-largest in Europe as a whole.
A accès aux chiens et aux frontaux qui lui ont été il peut consulter et modifier ses collections
et exporter Cet article concerne le pays européen aujourd’hui appelé République française.
Pour d’autres usages du nom France, Pour une aide rapide et effective, veuiller trouver votre aide
dans le menu ci-dessus.
Motoring events began soon after the construction of the first successful gasoline-fueled automobiles.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."""

isReliable, textBytesFound, details, vectors = cld2.detect(
    fr_en_Latn, returnVectors=True
)
print(vectors)
# ((0, 94, 'ENGLISH', 'en'), (94, 329, 'FRENCH', 'fr'), (423, 139, 'ENGLISH', 'en'))

API

This package exports one function, detect(). See help(detect) for the full docstring.

The first parameter (utf8Bytes) is the text for which you want to detect language.

utf8Bytes may be either:

• str (example: "¼ cup of flour")
• bytes that have been encoded using UTF-8 (example: "¼ cup of flour".encode("utf-8"))

Bytes that are not UTF-8 encoded will raise a pycld2.error. For example, passing b"\xbc cup of flour" (which is "¼ cup of flour".encode("latin-1")) will raise.

All other parameters are optional:

Parameter	Type/Default	Use
utf8Bytes	str or bytes*	The text to detect language for.
isPlainText	bool, default False	If False, then the input is HTML and CLD will skip HTML tags, expand HTML entities, detect HTML <lang ...> tags, etc.
hintTopLevelDomain	str	E.g., 'id' boosts Indonesian.
hintLanguage	str	E.g., 'ITALIAN' or 'it' boosts Italian; see cld.LANGUAGES for all known languages.
hintLanguageHTTPHeaders	str	E.g., 'mi,en' boosts Maori and English.
hintEncoding	str	E.g, 'SJS' boosts Japanese; see cld.ENCODINGS for all known encodings.
returnVectors	bool, default False	If True, then the vectors indicating which language was detected in which byte range are returned in addition to details. The vectors are a sequence of (bytesOffset, bytesLength, languageName, languageCode), in order. bytesOffset is the start of the vector, bytesLength is the length of the vector. Note that there is some added CPU cost if this is True. (Approx. 2x performance hit.)
debugScoreAsQuads	bool, default False	Normally, several languages are detected solely by their Unicode script. Combined with appropritate lookup tables, this flag forces them instead to be detected via quadgrams. This can be a useful refinement when looking for meaningful text in these languages, instead of just character sets. The default tables do not support this use.
debugHTML	bool, default False	For each detection call, write an HTML file to stderr, showing the text chunks and their detected languages. See cld2/docs/InterpretingCLD2UnitTestOutput.pdf to interpret this output.
debugCR	bool, default False	In that HTML file, force a new line for each chunk.
debugVerbose	bool, default False	In that HTML file, show every lookup entry.
debugQuiet	bool, default False	In that HTML file, suppress most of the output detail.
debugEcho	bool, default False	Echo every input buffer to stderr.
bestEffort	bool, default False	If True, then allow low-quality results for short text, rather than forcing the result to "UNKNOWN_LANGUAGE". This may be of use for those desiring approximate results on short input text, but there is no claim that these result are very good.

^{*If bytes, must be UTF-8 encoded bytes.}

Constants

This package exports these global constants:

Constant	Description
pycld2.ENCODINGS	list of the encoding names CLD recognizes (if you provide hintEncoding, it must be one of these names).
pycld2.LANGUAGES	list of languages and their codes (if you provide hintLanguageCode, it must be one of the codes from these codes).
pycld2.EXTERNAL_LANGUAGES	list of external languages and their codes.
pycld2.DETECTED_LANGUAGES	list of all detectable languages.

What About CLD3?

Python bindings for CLD3 are available as a separate project, pycld3.