cypunct: Fast-ish unicode string splitting

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.. image:: https://travis-ci.org/jamesmishra/cypunct.svg?branch=master :target: https://travis-ci.org/jamesmishra/cypunct

Cypunct is designed to solve the problem of quickly splitting a Unicode string based on a set of characters.

Cypunct is designed to work on Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.3+. Because Cypunct is a Cython extension, it will (probably) only work in the CPython runtime.

For Python versions 2.6 and 2.7, Cypunct will only run if these CPython runtimes are compiled with the flag --enable-unicode=ucs4. Cypunct will throw an exception if your Python 2 runtime was not compiled with UCS-4.

Installation

Installation is easiest with pip. Just run

.. code:: bash

pip install cypunct

You can find Cypunct on PyPI at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/cypunct

Usage

Cypunct takes a Unicode string and a frozenset of delimiter characters, and splits the string based on that set. Every delimiter character should be a single Unicode code point -- len(char) should be 1.

A simple example, where we provide a small frozenset is below.

.. code:: python

>>> from cypunct import split
>>> split("James Mishra is the... best human ever, or so I think.", frozenset({' ', '.', ','}))
['James', 'Mishra', 'is', 'the', 'best', 'human', 'ever', 'or', 'so', 'I', 'think', '']

However, if you only need to split on whitespace characters, str.split() much better performance. If you only need to split on one character, str.split(char) will also be much faster.

Cypunct really shines when you need to split on many possible characters, such as an entire Unicode character category <http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/category/index.htm>_.

The below example splits on all Unicode punctuation, and nothing else.

.. code:: python

>>> from cypunct.unicode_classes import P
>>> split("James Mishra is the... best human ever, or so I think.", P)
['James Mishra is the', ' best human ever', ' or so I think', ''] 

The following Unicode classes are available as sets:d 'C', 'Cc', 'Cf', 'Co', 'Cs', 'L', 'Ll', 'Lm', 'Lo', 'Lt', 'Lu', 'M', 'Mc', 'Me', 'Mn', 'N', 'Nd', 'Nl', 'No', 'P', 'Pc', 'Pd', 'Pe', 'Pf', 'Pi', 'Po', 'Ps', 'S', 'Sc', 'Sk', 'Sm', 'So', 'Z', 'Zl', 'Zp', 'Zs'

The following Unicode classes are available as sets:

======== =========== Category Description ======== =========== C Other Cc Other, Format Cf Other, Not Assigned Co Other, Private Use Cs Other, Surrogate L Letter Ll Letter, Lowercase Lm Letter, Modifier Lo Letter, Other Lt Letter, Titlecase Lu Letter, Uppercase M Mark Mc Mark, Space Combining Me Mark, Enclosing Mn Mark, Nonspacing N Number Nd Number, Decimal Digit Nl Number, Letter No Number, Other P Punctuation Pc Punctuation, Connector Pd Punctuation, Dash Pe Punctuation, Close Pf Punctuation, Final Quote Pi Punctuation, Initial Quote Po Punctuation, Other Ps Punctuation, Open S Symbol Sc Symbol, Currency Sk Symbol, Modifier Sm Symbol, Math So Symbol, Other Z Separator Zl Separator, Line Zp Separator, Paragraph Zs Separator, Space ======== ===========

cypunct.unicode_classes.COMMON_SEPARATORS is the union of the C, P, S, and Z frozensets. I have found it personally useful when splitting text for natural language processing applications.

If you don't specify a frozenset for Cypunct to use, then Cypunct will default to COMMON_SEPARATORS.

Updating Unicode data

Currently, cypunct.unicode_classes is a Python module autogenerated from a UnicodeData.txt file. The autogeneration script exists in make_punctuation_file.py <https://github.com/jamesmishra/cypunct/blob/master/make_punctuation_file.py>_.

Most Cypunct users will not need to concern themselves with this, but this is important to know if you are experiencing Unicode bugs or want to contribute to Cypunct.

The current UnicodeData.txt is from ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/10.0.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: I got an installation error involving "pkg_resources.VersionConflict (setuptools xx.xx.xx". How do I fix this?

You have a very old version of setuptools, and we won't be able to compile our Cython extension with it. Run pip install --upgrade setuptools and try installing Cypunct again.

Q: Wouldn't this be way faster if it were written in Pure C?

Yes, it would. I'm too lazy to hand-code a C CPython extension, but it's on my todo list. Right now, Cypunct is "fast enough", and I can move onto other things in my daily life.

However, if you want to take on the challenge of rewriting Cypunct in C and having the exact same functionality as the current Cython version, I'll send you $100 USD.