dictcom
dictcom is a simple Python package that extract dictionary info from Dictionary.com via web scraping. It can be thought of as an unofficial "API" for Dictionary.com.
Installation
dictcom is available on PyPI:
$ pip install dictcom
Currently it only works under Python 3. Tested with Python 3.4 and 3.5.
Usage
The package itself exposes two main methods, get_word
and get_word_pronunciation
.
get_word
downloads all the data found for the word provided and packages it into a Word
object:
import dictcom word = dictcom.get_word('something') # an instance of dictcom.models.Word
You can access the word's pronunciation (the textual representation of it) via the pronunciation
property:
word.pronunciation # '[suhm-thing]'
The definitions are found under the defs
property, as a dictionary. Each key of the dictionary represents one definition subsection, which usually means a different part of speech (for example noun or pronoun):
word.defs.keys() # ['pronoun', 'noun', 'adverb']
The value under each key is a list of Definition
instances. Each definition has two properties, text
and example
.
One can also download the audio file for the word's pronunciation:
pronun = word.get_pronunciation_audio() # an instance of dictcom.models.WordPronunciation pronun.audio # raw audio buffer pronun.content_type # the MIME type of the buffer data
You can also immediately get the pronunciation audio with get_word_pronunciation
, the other method exposed by the package.