Dictionary definitions class/script? 2

[Sleidia]

Hello

I would like to know if there are existing PHP classes/scripts that can retrieve the definition of any word from a remote dictionary database and display it on my own website.

I need one that can work with both French and English.

For example :

http://www.mydomain.com/definition/webdesigner/

... would display the definition of the word "webdesigner" on my page (with additional use of URL rewriting).

Thanks for the help

 

[Sleidia]

Well, I've found this for the English part :

http://www.hydroponicsearch.com/spelling/simplesearch.php

... but nothing for the french language

 

[jpadie]

le-dictionnaire.com? just write a scraper for it.

 

[feherke]

Hi

There is a special DICT protocol for such tasks. While there are a number of client and server applications, and there is a C library, is possible to exist a PHP library too. I would try to search for them.


Feherke.

http://free.rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[jpadie]

there is a pear class for DICT (pear:net_dict).

but I do not know of any french lexicon dict servers (there are quite a few translation servers).

 

[Sleidia]

Hi jpadie

What do you mean by "scraper"?
Do you mean a script that would query the url

http://www.le-dictionnaire.com/definition.php?mot=word-here

and then read/get the content from the page result?
If so, isn't there a risk that le-dictionnaire.com bans my IP in the long term?

 

[ingresman]

This might be a little off field for what you want but have a look at the Google Language API's at

http://code.google.com/intl/en/apis/ajaxlanguage/

you might need to dig about a bit to find the thing you want as the have AJAX versions and a RESTfull version (which I would use)
In my mind once I found a good English dictionary you only need to translate it not to find a possiblly different definition. The really good thing about the google stuff is your not just limited to french but just about all modern languages.

 

[Sleidia]

Thanks but yeah, that's not what I'm looking for because what I need is the definition of the word not its translation.
Thanks anyway.

 

[jpadie]

Hi Sleidia - yes, there is a risk, but you would cache the definitions so it is unlikely that you would hit the server too much or too hard unless your site is very high traffic.

and I see that the site does not (seem to) do any session management so a curl scraper should work ok without having to worry about cookies.

I'm assuming, as well, that you do not need to get a definition for every word ....

there is also, of course, larousse on line which offers another scraping opportunity.

Note that I am not saying that either site allows scraping.

 

[Sleidia]

Thanks

Seems like a good idea but unlike kDictAPI-PRO, french online dictionaries fail to provide definition for technical words such as PHP, html, css, etc.