The language detector langid.py has become quite popular. Using the modernized fork py3langid as an example I show how to maintain and optimize a Python package.

Grouping together the inflected forms of a word allows for analyzing them as a single item, identified by the dictionary form. The Python library Simplemma provides a simple and multilingual approach to look for base forms or lemmata.

htmldate performs better than the other Python solutions, it is also noticeably faster. Especially for smaller news outlets, websites and blogs, as well as pages written in languages other than English, it greatly extends date extraction coverage without sacrificing precision.

Python packages are compared with respect to robustness and speed. Raw text extraction of boilerplate and content segments reveals which web scraping tool is more adapted to the html2text challenge.

The Lucene-based search engine Elasticsearch is fast and adaptable, so that it suits most demanding configurations, including large text corpora. I use it daily with tweets and began to release the scripts I use to do so. In this post, I give concrete tips for indexation of text and linguistic analysis.

Mapping

You do not need to define a type for the indexed fields, the database can guess it for you, however it speeds up the process and gives more control to use a mapping. The official documentation is extensive and it is sometimes difficult to get a general idea …

The Internet is vast and full of different things. There are even tutorials explaining how to convert to or from XML formats using regular expressions. While this may work for very simple steps, as soon as exhaustive conversions and/or quality control is needed, working on a parsed document is the way to go.

In this post, I describe how I work using Python’s lxml module. I take the example of HTML to XML conversion, more specifically XML complying with the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, also known as XML TEI.

Update: I released a Python module that …

I am currently working on a project for which I need to identify WordPress blogs as fast as possible, given a list of URLs. I decided to write a review on this topic since I found relevant but sparse hints on how to do it.

First of all, let’s say that guessing if a website uses WordPress by analysing HTML code is straightforward if nothing was been done to hide it, which is almost always the case. As WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems, downloading every page and performing a check afterward is an option …

This morning I was looking for a way to delete the dispensable aux, bbl, blg, log, out and toc files that a pdflatex compilation generates. I wanted it to go through directories so that it would eventually find old files and delete them too. I also wanted to do it from the command-line interface and to integrate it within a bash script.

As I didn’t find this bash snippet as such, i.e. adapted to the LaTeX-generated files, I post it here:

find . -regex ".*\(aux\|bbl\|blg\|log\|nav\|out\|snm\|toc\)$" -exec rm -i {} \;

This works on Unix …