FORMS.md

Specification of form manipulation

Specification of the value-to-form processing in Lexibank datasets:

The value-to-form processing is divided into two steps, implemented as methods:

• FormSpec.split: Splits a string into individual form chunks.
• FormSpec.clean: Normalizes a form chunk.

These methods use the attributes of a FormSpec instance to configure their behaviour.

• brackets: {'(': ')'} Pairs of strings that should be recognized as brackets, specified as dict mapping opening string to closing string
• separators: ;/, Iterable of single character tokens that should be recognized as word separator
• missing_data: ('?', '-') Iterable of strings that are used to mark missing data
• strip_inside_brackets: True Flag signaling whether to strip content in brackets (and strip leading and trailing whitespace)
• replacements: [] List of pairs (source, target) used to replace occurrences of source in formswith target (before stripping content in brackets)
• first_form_only: False Flag signaling whether at most one form should be returned from split - effectively ignoring any spelling variants, etc.
• normalize_whitespace: True Flag signaling whether to normalize whitespace - stripping leading and trailing whitespace and collapsing multi-character whitespace to single spaces
• normalize_unicode: None UNICODE normalization form to use for input of split (None, 'NFD' or 'NFC')