scrape-forvo

Download pronunciation MP3s from Forvo search pages.

Installation

uv run python -m pip install -e .

Usage

Only this command is confirmed to work reliably:

scrape-forvo egg --use-playwright --headed

By default, the scraper uses Forvo language code no and downloads files using no as the filename prefix. You can change the language code with --lang:

scrape-forvo egg --lang en --use-playwright --headed

If you want a custom filename prefix, pass --prefix (this overrides the default language-based prefix):

scrape-forvo egg --lang en --prefix myset --use-playwright --headed

Forvo Language Codes (YAML)

The pairs below were collected from https://forvo.com/ language links (plus no from the homepage language menu: Norsk).

forvo_language_codes:
  ar: Arabic
  ca: Catalan
  chm: Mari
  cs: Czech
  de: German
  el: Greek
  en: English
  eo: Esperanto
  es: Spanish
  fa: Persian
  fi: Finnish
  fr: French
  grc: Ancient Greek
  ha: Hausa
  he: Hebrew
  hu: Hungarian
  it: Italian
  ja: Japanese
  ko: Korean
  lb: Luxembourgish
  nl: Dutch
  no: Norwegian
  pl: Polish
  pt: Portuguese
  ru: Russian
  sk: Slovak
  sv: Swedish
  tr: Turkish
  tt: Tatar
  uk: Ukrainian
  yue: Cantonese
  zh: Mandarin Chinese

Scriptable Usage

You can also import scrape_forvo and use it from Python:

from scrape_forvo import scrape

result = scrape(
    "egg",
    outdir="forvo_mp3",
    lang="no",
    use_playwright=True,
    headed=True,
)

print(result.downloaded_count)
for candidate in result.candidates:
    print(candidate.url, "->", candidate.out_path)

The scrape() arguments map directly to CLI flags, so both interfaces share the same behavior without duplicated logic. Internally, the search URL is built as https://forvo.com/search/<word>/<lang>/ (default lang="no").

Development

Set up the project virtual environment with uv:

uv sync

Then run commands from the environment:

source .venv/bin/activate

Install dev dependencies:

python -m pip install -e .[dev]

Run tests:

pytest

Optional live test

Set FORVO_LIVE_TEST=1 to enable the live integration test.

TODO

edge cases

• when multiple pronunciation files come out. which one to pick?
• when there's no pronunciation available.

integration

• integration with the vocab repo