dictcom 0.0.3

A pseudo-API for Dictionary.com that works by scraping its website.

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.