Bunpa is an extremely simple wrapper around the MeCab Japanese grammar parser. It was designed with two key features in mind:

1. Simplicity - only returns the text and major part of speech for each component
2. Completeness - ensures that whitespace and any unknown characters are preserved

Bunpa parses Japanese text into a set of ordered components. Each component represents either a part of speech (noun, verb, etc.) or formatting (whitespace, etc.) All components have a text value (exactly as they appear in the text provided) and kind (usually part of speech).

All grammatical information is provided by the excellent MeCab Japanese part of speech and morphological analyser. Formatting information is inserted into the set of components in a post processing step (it is not done by MeCab). These components have a fake 'kind' assigned to them. Currently the following kinds of formatting components are handled by Bunpa:

• spaces (スペース)
• tabs (タブ)
• newlines (改行)

Any components that cannot be identified by either MeCab or Bunpa are marked as unknown (未知).

From within your application's base directory:

1. Edit your Gemfile and add:

    gem 'bunpa'
   

2. Install the gem:

    bundle
   

Bunpa operates as a very simple parser. It returns the components it identifies as an Array of Bunpa::Text::Component objects, in the same order as they appear in the document. Each Component object has two accessors - 'text' and 'kind', which return the text value and part of speech of the component respectively.

Basic usage is as follows:

require 'bunpa'

# Create the parser
parser = Bunpa::JapaneseTextParser.new

# Get an enumerable of Bunpa::Text::Components
components = parser.parse("A: こんにちは！ お元気ですか。\nB: はい、元気です！")

components.each do |component|
  puts "#{component.text}\t(#{component.kind}"
end

This would output:

A       (名詞)
:       (名詞)
        (スペース)
こんにちは      (感動詞)
！      (記号)
        (スペース)
お      (接頭詞)
元気    (名詞)
です    (助動詞)
か      (助詞)
。      (記号)

        (改行)
B       (名詞)
:       (名詞)
        (スペース)
は      (助詞)
い      (動詞)
、      (記号)
元気    (名詞)
です    (助動詞)
！      (記号)

For a slightly more detailed example, see the usage_example.rb script in the bin directory.

This is very much a work in progress - it only has minimal testing at the moment, so use at your own risk :)