Command-Line Options
This page is not maintained anymore. To get a list of command-line options for LanguageTool, call java -jar languagetool-commandline.jar -h.
LanguageTool can be started from the command line with java -jar languagetool-commandline.jar You need to specify the filename of the plain text file to be checked. More advanced options are documented here:
| Option/Parameter | Explanation |
|---|---|
| --help, --?, -h, -help | Display usage message. |
| - | Use standard input instead of a file. |
| --api | Display LanguageTool output in XML API format - deprecated, please use the JSON API in server mode instead, which is usually faster, as it has no start up overhead. |
| --json | Display LanguageTool output in JSON format - consider using the JSON API in server mode instead, which is usually faster, as it has no start up overhead. |
| -adl, --autoDetect | Automatically detect language. Note that for languages with a variant, this will not detect the variant like "English (US)". Consequently, you'll not get spell checking for these languages. |
| -a, --apply | Use the rules to correct the text directly rather than display suggestions. Note: rules that don't offer corrections are silently ignored. You might use this option to automatically edit the files. Caveat: you might want to select only some very reliable rules to avoid possible false positives. |
| -b | Make single line break a paragraph break. By default, a paragraph break is introduced only after two line breaks. If your input is a list of unrelated lines that contain full sentences, you might want to use this parameter. |
| -b2, --bitext | Check the text in bilingual mode. Use -m parameter to specify the source language, and -l to specify the target. LanguageTool expects the bilingual segments to be on a single line, where the source segment is separated from target with a tab. |
| -c, --encoding | Input text encoding. All Java-recognized encodings are accepted. |
| -d, --disable | Disable specified rules when checking. Rules are delimited with a comma and without spaces after the comma. Note: you cannot specify both enabled and disabled rules at the same time. |
| -e, --enable | Enable only specified rules, delimited with a comma and without spaces after the comma. Note: you cannot specify both enabled and disabled rules at the same time. |
| -eo, --enabledonly | Disable all rules except those specified in --enable. Note: you cannot specify both enabledonly and disabled rules at the same time. |
| --disablecategories | Requires LT 3.3 or later - Disable all rules in the given categories. Use the ids of the categories, not their names. See -d for formatting. |
| --enablecategories | Requires LT 3.3 or later - Enable all rules in the given categories. Use the ids of the categories, not their names. See -d for formatting. |
| -l, --language | Text language as a character code (e.g. en for English). Note that you need to specify a variant (e.g. en-US) if you want spell checking to be active. |
| --languagemodel | A directory with '1grams'…'3grams' sub directories with Lucene indexes that contain ngram occurrence counts; activates the confusion rule if supported. See here. |
| --list | Print all available languages and exit. |
| -m, --mothertongue | User's mother tongue as a language code (e.g. de-DE). Used for scanning for false friends. |
| -p, --profile | Launch LanguageTool in the profiling mode for testing the speed of matching. |
| -r, --recursive | Run LanguageTool recursively on a set of files. |
| -t, --taggeronly | Use LanguageTool to tag the text. No check is executed. |
| -u, --list-unknown | List words unknown to LanguageTool tagger. Useful for checking the coverage of the tagger. Note: you cannot specify --taggeronly and –-list-unknown at the same time. In the tagging mode, untagged words are visible anyway as untagged words, so the parameter makes no sense. Note that this is unrelated to whether LanguageTool detects a word as correct or incorrect with its spell checker. |
| -v, --verbose | Verbose mode: display POS tags assigned by LanguageTool. The POS tags are output to stderr (you can pipe them to a file using 2> file). |
| --line-by-line | work on file line by line (only for development, e.g. inside an IDE - error positions might not be correct, cross-paragraph rules might not work) |
Examples
Run LanguageTool on a Polish text:
java -jar languagetool-commandline.jar -l pl polishfile.txt
In case of encoding problems under Windows you might need to specify the encoding like this:
java -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -jar languagetool-commandline.jar -l ru russian_file.txt
Tag UTF-8 encoded Polish text:
java -jar languagetool-commandline.jar -l pl -c UTF-8 -t polishfile.txt
Use verbose mode to see the tags to test rules interactively:
java -jar languagetool-commandline.jar -l en -v -b -
This mode of operation can be useful to see the tags immediately after inputting the text on the keyboard and see why a given rule doesn't work as expected.
page revision: 32, last edited: 22 Sep 2020 14:30