liwca 0.1.0a2

Linguistic Inquiry Word Count Assistant

LIWCA

LIWCA (Linguistic Inquiry Word Count Assistant) offers helper functions for working with LIWC dictionaries. Useful when you want end-to-end pipelines or notebook workflows that don't require the LIWC-22 app to be open, or when you just need reusable .dic[x] file I/O without writing it from scratch every project.

Features:

• Reading and writing dictionary files (.dic/.dicx)
• Merging dictionary files
• Fetching public LIWC-format dictionaries from remote repositories
• Pure-Python word counting (no LIWC-22 needed)
• Calling liwc-22-cli from Python

Installation

pip install --upgrade liwca

Quick Start

import liwca

# Fetch a public dictionary and count words (no LIWC-22 needed)
dx = liwca.fetch_threat()
results = liwca.count(["danger lurks ahead"], dx)

Usage

Fetching dictionaries

import liwca

dx = liwca.fetch_sleep()           # Fetch and load a public dictionary
dx = liwca.fetch_bigtwo()          # Versioned dictionary (version="a" by default)
dx = liwca.read_dx("./my.dicx")    # Read a local dictionary file
liwca.write_dx(dx, "./my.dic")     # Write to a different format

Word counting

Pure-Python word counting using LIWC-style dictionaries (no LIWC-22 needed).

texts = ["I feel happy today", "This is a sad story"]
results = liwca.count(texts, dx)                      # percentages (default)
results = liwca.count(texts, dx, as_percentage=False)  # raw counts

LIWC-22 wrapper (requires LIWC-22)

The LIWC-22 desktop application (or its license server) must be running when you call the CLI. See the LIWC CLI documentation and Python CLI example for more details.

liwca.liwc22("wc", input="data.csv", output="results.csv")

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• liwc-python
• lingmatch
• sentibank