Overview

pykakasi is a Python Natural Language Processing (NLP) library to transliterate hiragana, katakana and kanji (Japanese text) into rōmaji (Latin/Roman alphabet). It can handle characters in NFC form.

Its algorithms are based on the kakasi library, which is written in C.

• Install (from PyPI): pip install pykakasi

• Install (from conda-forge): conda install -c conda-forge pykakasi

• Documentation available on readthedocs

Supported python versions

• pykakasi supports python 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13 and pypy3

Usage

Transliterate Japanese text to kana, hiragana and romaji:

import pykakasi
kks = pykakasi.kakasi()
text = "かな漢字"
result = kks.convert(text)
for item in result:
    print("{}: kana '{}', hiragana '{}', romaji: '{}'".format(item['orig'], item['kana'], item['hira'], item['hepburn']))

かな: kana 'カナ', hiragana: 'かな', romaji: 'kana'
漢字: kana 'カンジ', hiragana: 'かんじ', romaji: 'kanji'

Here is an example that output as similar with furigana mode.

import pykakasi
kks = pykakasi.kakasi()
text = "かな漢字交じり文"
result = kks.convert(text)
for item in result:
    print("{}[{}] ".format(item['orig'], item['hepburn'].capitalize()), end='')
print()

かな[Kana] 漢字[Kanji] 交じり[Majiri] 文[Bun]

Copyright and License

PyKakasi::

Copyright (C) 2010-2024 Hiroshi Miura and contributors(see AUTHORS)

KAKASI Dictionary::

Copyright (C) 2010-2021 Hiroshi Miura and contributors(see AUTHORS)

Copyright (C) 1992 1993 1994 Hironobu Takahashi, Masahiko Sato, Yukiyoshi Kameyama, Miki Inooka, Akihiko Sasaki, Dai Ando, Junichi Okukawa, Katsushi Sato and Nobuhiro Yamagishi

UniDic::

Copyright (c) 2011-2021, The UniDic Consortium

All rights reserved.

Unidic is released under any of the GPL2, the LGPL2.1, or the 3-clause BSD License. (See src/data/unidic/BSD.txt) PyKakasi relicenses a part of the unidic with GPL3+.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.