how to find out if string is in the dictionary

Question

I want to know if a word is in the dictionary.

Here is what I am trying.

import requests

def word_in_dictionary(word):
    response = requests.get('https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/'+word)
    return response.status_code==200

print(word_in_dictionary('potato')) # True
print(word_in_dictionary('nobblebog')) # False

But unfortunately the dictionary contains a lot of words that are not English and I don't want to match those.

print(word_in_dictionary('bardzo')) # WANT THIS TO BE FALSE

So I tried to look in the content.

def word_in_dictionary(word):
    response = requests.get('https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/'+word)
    return response.status_code==200 and 'English' in response.content.decode()

But I am still getting True. It is finding "English" somewhere in the page source even though the rendered page doesn't have it (nothing when I search with ctrl-F in the browser).

How can I make it only return True if it is actually listed as having a meaning in English?

If the word "English" is in some consistent spot in the page, that would probably be a better way to check than looking at the entire page (prone to errors, as you found out). — Mateen Ulhaq, Aug 28 '20 at 11:07
Try in your browser view page source then search for English - it’s probably there. Or save the decoded content to file and check that in an editor like Notepad++ — DisappointedByUnaccountableMod, Aug 28 '20 at 11:07
Possible duplicate of [How to retrieve Wiktionary word content?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2770547/how-to-retrieve-wiktionary-word-content) — mkrieger1, Aug 28 '20 at 11:09
Use something like BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML, then check whether there's the word "English" in an `
` tag? — Jiří Baum, Aug 28 '20 at 11:10
As seen on the duplicate question, using Wiktionary for this purpose is problematic. Maybe you can download a list of English words? For example: https://github.com/dwyl/english-words/ — Thomas, Aug 28 '20 at 11:12

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 28 '20 at 11:10

Looking at the HTML code, if the word is english, there's tag with id="English". You can try this code:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


def word_in_dictionary(word):
    response = requests.get('https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/'+word)
    return response.status_code==200 and bool(BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser').select_one('#English'))

print(word_in_dictionary('potato')) # True
print(word_in_dictionary('nobblebog')) # False
print(word_in_dictionary('bardzo')) # False

how to find out if string is in the dictionary

` tag?

1 Answers1