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In computing, stop words are words which are filtered out before or after processing of natural language data.

- Wikipedia -

In SEO terminology, stop words are the most common words that most search engines avoid, for the purposes of saving space and time in processing of large data during crawling or indexing. This helps search engines to save space in their databases. For example, at, which, is, the, and are some words categorized as stop words.

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There are 3 ways to contribute in this repo:

• Add new stop words list file.
• Edit and do some improvements to existing stop words list.
• Enhance the python script parser.py so it can sort the words for all languages based on the respective language dictionary.

Here are the steps to contribute to this repo:

1. Fork this repository

2. Clone the repository to your local

   git clone https://github.com/<YOUR-USERNAME>/Stop-Words-List.git

3. Create a .txt file in list/ directory and rename it to following format: [YOUR_LANGUAGE_IN_ENGLISH].txt. For example:

   • english.txt
   • chinese.txt
   • arabic.txt

   Ignore this step if your language stop words list has already exist in this repo.

4. Put the stop words list in the respective file you have made on step 3/existing stop words list file. Place only one word in one line! If you are editing the existing stop words list file, please DO NOT DELETE/EDIT anything that already exist. Please ensure that the words you want to add to list have not exist yet in the txt file.

5. Don't forget to put your name in CONTRIBUTORS.md and follow the format there.

6. Save the files.

7. Install the dependencies for parser.py and run the script.

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   python parser.py
   

   This script helps you to rearrange the list and sanitize the words, but CANNOT HELP you on ensuring each lines have only one word.

8. In order testing whether your newly added words satisfy the rules or not, you can run this line of code.

   python -m pytest test_unittest.py
   

   This step is optional, because Github will automatically test these things when you push to the forked repo or after the creation of pull request.

9. Commit and push to your forked repository.

10. Create the pull request.

    Make sure all the checks are passed during pull request. The pull request will be accepted if and only if your PR can satisfiy all the checks. Otherwise, do not panic, please read the guideline.

    • Here is the example when your changes satisfies all the rules in checks.

      

    • The following image shows when your changes failed to satisfy the checks.

      

11. Congratulations! You have made the priceless contribution.

When you get unsuccessful checks, please do these following steps:

1. Press the link Show all checks

2. Press the link Details on any unsuccessful check.

3. Go to the Test with pytest section and carefully read what makes the test failed.

   

4. If the unsuccessful check caused by another list than you have added/changed ones or another sections than the Test with pytest, please tell the maintainer, describe the issue and also send the screenshot about it.

5. If the reason of unsuccessful is the files you have added/modified, please re-read the rules and ensure that your changes satisfy the rules.

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• Place only one word in one line in the stop words list txt file.

• To be counted as a contribution, you need to add at least 10 lines in your respective language file.

• Please double-check the whole list and ensure the list satisfies these requirements:

  • No any duplicate words.
  • All the words in the list, if they are considered as alphabet/LATIN then they must be lowercase.
  • Make sure the word list is sorted according to the dictionary.
  • Each lines in the list does not contain any white space/punctuation.

• DO NOT DELETE the previous contributors' names in the CONTRIBUTIORS.md

• When filling the CONTRIBUTORS.md, please make sure the list is arranged in dictionary order based on the language name.

• PRs will be merged if and only if it satisfies all the rules.