french-deconjugator(1)

NAME
french-deconjugator - analyze conjugated French verbs

SYNOPSIS
echo aimé | french-deconjugator > result.txt

DESCRIPTION

french-deconjugator reads conjugated French verbs from the command line or from standard input and writes (to standard output) the verb's infinitive form, the mode (infinitive, indicative, conditional, subjunctive, imperative or participle), the tense (present, past, imperfect, future), the person (1, 2 or 3, while 0 is used for the present participle tense, and 4 and 5 are used in the past participle tense), and the number (singular or plural). These fields are separated by a comma and a space.

The standard input is not read if verbs are passed as command-line arguments.

By convention, persons 4 and 5 are used in the past participle tense to indicate the gender: 4 means masculine (e.g., "aimé" or "aimés") and 5 means feminine (e.g., "aimée" or "aimées").

A single conjugated form can correspond to more than one mode, tense and person. In this case, each alternative is written on its own line.

In all cases, the end of the answer is marked by an empty line. If the word is unknown, only this empty line is written. The names for the mode, tense and number are always in English. (This is meant to facilitate automatic parsing of the output. For a French user interface, see the GNOME application and applet.)

The command flushes its output buffer after finishing each answer. This allows the command to be easily called from another program through two pipes.

The command starts by loading its database from XML files (stored typically in /usr/share/verbiste). This takes some time, so it is a good idea to have the command answer many requests instead of running it for each request.

The verbiste library's source archive contains Perl and Java example programs that illustrate this technique.

This commands expects to read Latin-1 characters and writes Latin-1 characters. There must not be any leading or trailing white spaces on the lines read by the command.

OPTIONS

--help
    display a help page and exit

--version
    display version information and exit

--utf8
    assume that the terminal uses the UTF-8 encoding instead of Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) -- try this option if Verbiste claims not to know a verb that contains an accented character

--all-infinitives
    print the infinitive form of all the verbs in the knowledge base, one per line, unsorted -- other command-line arguments are ignored

EXAMPLES
$ french-deconjugator aimé
aimer, participle, past, 0, singular
$ echo -ne 'a\nplu\nété\n' | french-deconjugator
avoir, indicative, present, 3, singular
plaire, participle, past, 0, singular
pleuvoir, participle, past, 0, singular
être, participle, past, 0, singular

LICENSE
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License. This program has absolutely no warranty.

AUTHOR
See the verbiste(3) manual page.

BUGS
See the verbiste(3) manual page.

SEE ALSO
verbiste(3), french-conjugator(1).