Previously, I wrote about adding syllabic stress marks to Russian text. Here’s a method for doing the opposite - that is, removing such marks (ударение) from Russian text. Although there may well be a more sophisticated approach, regex is well-suited to this task. The problem is that def string_replace(dict,text): sorted_dict = {k: dict[k] for k in sorted(dict)} for n in sorted_dict.keys(): text = text.replace(n,dict[n]) return text dict = { "а́" : "а", "е́" : "е", "о́" : "о", "у́" : "у", "я́" : "я", "ю́" : "ю", "ы́" : "ы", "и́" : "и", "ё́" : "ё", "А́" : "А", "Е́" : "Е", "О́" : "О", "У́" : "У", "Я́" : "Я", "Ю́" : "Ю", "Ы́" : "Ы", "И́" : "И", "Э́" : "Э", "э́" : "э" } print(string_replace(dict, "Существи́тельные в шве́дском обычно де́лятся на пять склоне́ний.

The AppleScript Safari API is apparently quite finicky and rejects Russian Cyrillic characters when loading URLs. For example, the following URL https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/стоять#Russian throws an error in AppleScript. Instead, Safari requires URL’s of the form https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C#Russian whereas Chrome happily consumes whatever comes along. So, we just need to encode the URL thusly: use framework "Foundation" – encode Cyrillic test as "%D0" type strings on urlEncode(input) tell current application's NSString to set rawUrl to stringWithString_(input) – 4 is NSUTF8StringEncoding set theEncodedURL to rawUrl's stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:4 return theEncodedURL as Unicode text end urlEncode When researching Russian words for vocabulary study, I use the URL encoding handler to load the appropriate words into several reference sites in sequential Safari tabs.

While largely opaque to most users, Facebook and Google massage any links that you acquire on their sites to include data used to track you around the web. This script attempts to strip these surveillance parameters from the URL’s. It is by no means all-inclusive. Imaginably, there are links that I haven’t yet encountered and that need to be considered in a future version. So consider this a proof-of-concept. The problem For example, I performed a Google search1 for “Smarties”.

As part of a Hazel rule to process downloaded mp3 files, I worked out a couple different methods for extracting the ID3 title tag. Not rocket science, but it took a little time to sort out. Both rely on non-standard third-party tools, both for parsing the text and for extracting the ID3 tags. Extracting ID3 title with ffprobe ffprobe is part of the ffmpeg suite of tools which on macOS can be installed with Homebrew.

Having fallen in love with Keyboard Maestro for its flexibility in macOS automation, I began experimenting with scripting in various languages, like my old favourite Perl. That’s when the fun began. How do we access KM variables inside a Perl script. Let’s see what the documentation says: So the documentation clearly states that this script #!/usr/bin/perl print scalar reverse $KMVAR_MyVar; should work if I have a KM variable named MyVar. But, you guessed it - it does not.

Justification Although caching can make page loads notably faster, it comes with a cost. Browsers aren’t always capable of taking note when a cached resource has changed. I’ve noticed recently that Safari utterly refuses to reload .css files even after emptying the browser cache and clearing the web history. Background With a lot of help from the a pair of articles written by Ukiah Smith, I’ve developed a workflow for dealing with this problem during the deployment process.

Building on my earlier explorations of the UDAR project, I’ve created a macOS Service-like method for in-situ marking of syllabic stress in arbitrary Russian text. The following video shows it in action: The Keyboard Maestro is simple; we execute the following script, bracketed by Copy and Paste: #!/Users/alan/.pyenv/shims/python3 import xerox import udar import re rawText = xerox.paste() doc1 = udar.Document(rawText, disambiguate=True) searchText = doc1.stressed() result = re.sub(r'( ,)', ",", searchText) xerox.

After installing Stanza as dependency of UDAR which I recently described, I decided to play around with what is can do. Installation The installation is straightforward and is documented on the Stanza getting started page. First, sudo pip3 install stanza Then install a model. For this example, I installed the Russian model: #!/usr/local/bin/python3 import stanza stanza.download('ru') Usage Part-of-speech (POS) and morphological analysis Here’s a quick example of POS analysis for Russian.

One of the challenges that Russian learners face is the placement of syllabic stress, an essential determinate of pronunciation. Although most pedagogical texts for students have marks indicating stress, practically no tests intended for native speakers do. The placement of stress is inferred from memory and context. I was delighted to discover Dr. Robert Reynolds' work on natural language processing of Russian text to mark stress based on grammatical analysis of the text.

sed is such a useful pattern-matching and substitution tool for work on the command line. But there’s a little quirk on macOS that will trip you up. It tripped me up. On most platforms, \s is the character class for whitespace. It’s ubiquitous in regexes. But on macOS, it doesn’t work. In fact, it silently fails. Consider this bash one-liner which looks like it should work but doesn’t:

should print I am corrupt (W.