ThatLanguage::Client

A drop-in replacement for the that_language gem that answers each call over HTTP against a that_language-service instance, instead of loading wordlists locally.

Same ThatLanguage module, same methods, same return types — but no 16 MB of wordlists in your process and no cold-start cost.

gem 'that_language-client'

Requires Ruby 3.1 or later.

Upgrading from 0.1.2? Return types changed. This gem is meant to be a drop-in replacement for that_language, and it was not: language names are symbols and language codes are strings in the core gem, but 0.1.2 returned strings throughout and left available_languages unsorted. Seven of fourteen public methods were affected. If your code compares those results against strings, it needs updating. to_h still returns the raw wire format.

This gem is a client and does nothing on its own. The default host is localhost:4567, which is what the service container listens on:

docker run -p 4567:4567 that_language-service

Point it somewhere else with:

ThatLanguage::Client.configure do |config|
  config.host = "https://api.example.com"
end

The host may be a bare example.com, a host:port, or a full base URL. Without a scheme, http is assumed.

Earlier versions defaulted to a hosted domain. That host went offline, which left the gem inert out of the box with nothing to show for it but a connection error. The default is now something you can start yourself.

text = "This is just a random english sentence."

ThatLanguage.language(text)
# => :English

ThatLanguage.language_code(text)
# => "en"

detect = ThatLanguage.detect(text)
detect.language        # => :English
detect.language_code   # => "en"
detect.confidence      # => 0.5631093821386951
detect.to_h            # => {"language"=>"English", ...}  # raw wire format

details = ThatLanguage.details(text)
winner = details.winner
winner.language        # => :English
winner.language_code   # => "en"
winner.confidence      # => 0.5631093821386951
winner.value           # => 3.9417656749708656
winner.hit_ratio       # => 0.8571428571428571
winner.hit_count       # => 6
winner.words_count     # => 7
details.results        # => [#<OpenStruct ...>, ...]

ThatLanguage.available
# => { ak: :Akan, am: :Amharic, ... }

ThatLanguage.available_languages
# => [:Akan, :Amharic, ...]

ThatLanguage.available_language_codes
# => [:ak, :am, ...]

ThatLanguage.api_version   # the *remote service's* version
# => "0.1.2"

Following the core gem: language names are symbols, language codes are strings. available is keyed by symbol with symbol values, and both available_languages and available_language_codes come back sorted.

JSON has no symbols, so this gem converts at the boundary. Before this was fixed, every one of those returned a string and available_languages was unsorted — which meant the gem was not actually a drop-in replacement. to_h is the exception and still gives you the raw wire format.

bundle install
bundle exec rspec     # 56 examples
bundle exec rubocop

Tested on Ruby 3.2, 3.3 and 4.0. The specs stub HTTP with webmock and never touch the network.

To check parity against a real service rather than stubs, start the container and exercise the gem against it — that is how the symbol/string drift above was found, and stubs alone would not have caught it, because the stubs encoded the same wrong assumption the code did.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/Deradon/that_language-client. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.