plainstream

Sometimes you just need a lot of text. Plainstream is a Python application that provides you with a plain text stream directly from Wikipedia in any of its supporting languages.

Usage

As a Python module:

import plainstream
for sentence in plainstream.get_text('en', max_words=20000, tokenize=True):
    print(line)

Example output:

['Anarchism', 'is', 'a', 'political', 'philosophy', 'that', 'advocates', 'stateless', 'societies', 'often', 'defined', 'as', 'self-governed', 'voluntary', 'institutions', ',', 'but', 'that', 'several', 'authors', 'have', 'defined', 'as', 'more', 'specific', 'institutions', 'based', 'on', 'non-hierarchical', 'free', 'associations', '.']
...

Command line:

usage: plainstream [-h] -l LANGUAGE [-w WORDS] [-b BYTES] [--tokenize]
                   [--train_sentence_tokenizer]

Stream text from Wikipedia.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -l LANGUAGE, --language LANGUAGE
                        Language code according to ISO_639-1, e.g. en, sv
  -w WORDS, --words WORDS
                        Maximum number of words to print (only works for
                        space-separated languages).
  -b BYTES, --bytes BYTES
                        Maximum number of bytes to print.
  --tokenize            Tokenize the text and output one word per line,
                        sentences split with newline.
  --train_sentence_tokenizer
                        For non-English text it might raise the quality to
                        train the sentence segmenter. This increases the
                        startup time.

Example output:

plainstream -l en -w 20000 --tokenize

Anarchism
is
a
political
philosophy    
...

Installation

python setup.py install

Compatibility

Tested on python 3.4.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the developers of WikiExtractor.py, Medialab, for providing the Wikipedia plain text parser.