The Chinese Character Web API provides a programmatic way to get information about Chinese characters through a live interface on the Web.
For complete documentation, see http://ccdb.hemiola.com/.
Chinese Character Web API
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12 responses to “Chinese Character Web API”
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Do you plan to make these Web APIs for open source project? I’m developing a iPad software for learning Chinese, but I’m not sure if I can rely on your web service. If I can host my own, it will be great.
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I like the concept, but I’m not sure about licensing. The API is exposing data from unicode.org, and though the data is free to use as long as you don’t charge for any derivatives, it’s not open source in the sense of people being able to contribute back to it.
So, there are two things: the data itself and the method of access. I’ve been experimenting with the method of access, and I thought a Web API was kind of cool. However, I have to admit that for performance and reliability, I think most app developers would probably want a local DB, trimmed down to just what they need.
But back to the original topic, let’s say “phase 2” of this API experiment would be making it either open source or at least freely-accessible in some way. Sorry I don’t have timeline, as this is a spare-time activity.
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Great work! Does your API make it possible to list alternate forms of a given character? For example, given 國, the Unihan database lists these alternates: 囯囶囻国圀. With this method, a web-based version of the Unihan Variant Dictionary http://www.ideographer.com/unihan/ would be possible.
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You mention that for 國, the Unihan database lists these alternates: 囯囶囻国圀. But If I go here:
http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=%E5%9C%8B
I see only three variants. Yes, that information is available via my API, as follows:
As I was exploring the Unihan database, I looked at a lot of variants (beyond the basic traditional/simplified), and they made almost universally no sense to me. I showed a bunch of them to a native speaker, who could also derive no meaning from most of them. My conclusion was that they were getting into esoterica that weren’t that useful to a learner of the language, and thus I didn’t create any streamlined APIs for getting variants (beyond dealing with traditional/simplified).
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Wanted to drop a comment and say thank you for writing this! This was the best accessible Chinese char->radical resource I could find after some digging around. I’m using it in my own open-source project and will have this resource listed in the README
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Thank you. I tried to try your site, but when I click the Upload Text button, it shows the busy swirl for a long time and nothing else happens. I’ve tried recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
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Is there an https version of the API call?
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No.
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When I do /radicals, I get all the radicals but only the numbers associated with them. How can I get the actual radical for it?
For example, I know 1 is 一，but the computer doesn’t know that. Unless I create a huge object with the numbers associated with the radicals, I don’t know what the radical is. Please help!
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/characters/radicals/ returns all radicals as numbers.
/characters/radicals/?fields=string returns all radicals as numbers and strings.
Does this help?
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The field altDefinition is (kind of) the English word for the meaning. I need for my pupose the German word. You don’t support that out of the box, right?
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No.
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