Wordniknik

A Ruby wrapper for the Wordnik API

This is a Ruby wrapper for the Wordnik API. Wordnik is an online dictionary with an API for getting definitions, synonyms, antonyms, and more, as described it developer.wordnik.com. This gem provides functions for the word and words endpoints of the API.

TODO: Replace wordniknik with your gem name right after releasing it to RubyGems.org. Please do not do it earlier due to security reasons. Alternatively, replace this section with instructions to install your gem from git if you don't plan to release to RubyGems.org.

Install the gem and add to the application's Gemfile by executing:

bundle add wordniknik

If bundler is not being used to manage dependencies, install the gem by executing:

gem install wordniknik

To use the gem, you will need to sign up for a Wordnik API key at developer.wordnik.com. Once you have your key, you can set it as an environment variable in your shell:

export WORDNIK_API_KEY=your_api_key

or in a yaml file called .wordnik.yml.

wordnik_api_key: your_api_key

require 'wordniknik'
client = Wordniknik::Client.new
client.definitions('ruby').each do |definition|
  puts definition[:text]
end

This gem uses net/http to make requests to the Wordnik API. If you want to use a different HTTP library, you can supply a different http_client to the Wordniknik::Client constructor. For example:

require 'faraday'
client = Wordniknik::Client.new(http_client: Faraday.new('https://api.wordnik.com'))

The original Wordnik gem was written in 2011; the last significant update was in 2013. As a result, the original gem does not work well with the current Wordnik API.

This gem is a rewrite of the original gem, with a focus on the word and words endpoints, and with minimizing dependencies. The official Wordnik documentation of the API is at developer.wordnik.com/docs. Some of these endpoints no longer work, and some of the data can be difficult to work with.

This gem provides a way to get the data as the API provides it, without any additional clean up, but by default it will return results in a more useable format. All results returned are returned as results from the API, interpreted as base Ruby objects. The documentation for the methods in the gem describe the parameters and return formats with a focus on the cleaned up results. Certain parameters technically allowed by the API do not have an effect on the results returned by the API (in particular, the useCanonical parameter), and so are not included in the documentation. Functions that return deprecation notices are not included in the gem (in particular, reverseDictionary and search).

In general the naming conventions of the methods in the gem use Ruby conventions, not the conventions of the API. For example, the API uses sourceDictionary and includePartOfSpeech, while the gem uses source_dictionary and include_part_of_speech. Generally, symbols are used for parameters and keys. For example, consider the following call:

client.definitions('erinaceous', limit:1)

The results look like this (showing only keys with values):

[{:attribution_text=>"from The Century Dictionary.",
  :source_dictionary=>"century",
  :text=>"Belonging to the hedgehog family; resembling a hedgehog.",
  :word=>"erinaceous",
  :attribution_url=>"https://www.wordnik.com/colophon#century/",
  :wordnik_url=>"https://www.wordnik.com/words/erinaceous"
}]

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/willf/wordniknik.