pyDiction is a dictionary developed using Python programming language version 3.6.1 in Anaconda environment. To build the dictionary a complete data set has been used, which is a JSON file containing words as key and their corresponding meanings or definitions as Values, hence making a key-value pair, similar to dictionary data structure in Python.
The code is very simple to understand though, just a few things that need to be noted are the ones I have included here.
dictionaryData = json.load(open("DictionaryData.json"))
This line loads the JSON file into the scope of the code as a python dictionary into the variable dictionaryData.
for count, meaning in enumerate(meanings, 1):
print("[Meaning %d]: %s " %(count , meaning))
In the above code enumerate acts as an iterator that traverses over the meanings list, and prints it out in the next line.
similarWords = get_close_matches(query, dictionaryData.keys(), cutoff = 0.75)
The above line is the key in this entire code. The purpose for which this line is kept here is that, if user mistakenly enters some incorrect spelling of a word, then instead of having the user to repeat the entire process again, the dictionary automatically suggests a word which is close to the entered word.
This is done with the help of the get_close_match() function, to which three parameters are passed, the last one being an optional argument.
In the above code, query is the first parameter that I have passed, which is the word that the user enters to find the meaning, the second argument passed is dictionary.keys() which is a list containing the words from the dictionaryData against which the word entered by the user will be matched for finding similarity. cutoff is the third parameter passed to the function, which specifies the degree of strictness to which the match will be examined. Here, I have used 0.75 as the cutoff, but it can be set to any other value as per the need.
except KeyError as e:
handleSimilarity(query)
In the main function, the above try-except block has been used in order to handle the KeyError which is generated if a particular key is not found in the dictionaryData. Hence, it is handled by using the handleSimilarity method which checks for a similar match, if found then it returns that match else it responds by giving a not found message.