indic-transliteration

What it is and what it does

indic_transliteration is a library for converting text between Indic scripts and transliteration schemes commonly used for Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, and related languages. It supports conversion between native scripts (Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurumukhi, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi) and romanization schemes (Harvard-Kyoto, IAST, ITRANS, SLP1, WX). The package includes utilities for fixing lazy anusvaara and visarga characters, converting to lay Indian search terms, and customizing transliteration schemes.

Beyond the Python API, it provides a command-line tool (`sanscript`) for batch transliteration of files or standard input, with support for reading from and writing to files or pipes. The library is actively maintained, has no known security vulnerabilities, and depends only on lightweight utilities like regex, typer, and tqdm.

Use it for:

• Convert Sanskrit or Hindi text from Harvard-Kyoto romanization to Devanagari script for display or storage
• Batch-process text files containing multiple Indic scripts, normalizing them to a single target encoding
• Build search functionality that accepts both native-script and romanized input for the same text
• Develop educational tools that teach transliteration between Indic scripts and Latin-based schemes
• Normalize lazy diacritics and special characters in Indic text before further processing or analysis

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Converts text between different Indic script encodings (Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, and others) and transliteration schemes (Harvard-Kyoto, IAST, ITRANS, SLP1, WX).

Yes. The package is actively maintained, has no security vulnerabilities, uses a permissive MIT license, and installs with low friction. It fills a specific and well-defined role for Indic script conversion with a stable API and both programmatic and CLI interfaces. Install it if you need to work with Indic scripts or transliteration schemes.

Install

indic-transliteration on PyPI

pip install indic-transliteration

uv add indic-transliteration

poetry add indic-transliteration

Installing indic-transliteration

Before you install

Low install friction with a pure-Python wheel distribution. Active maintenance with a recent release and steady repository activity. Six runtime dependencies are all lightweight and widely available.

License in practice

MIT license permits unrestricted use, modification, and distribution in commercial and private projects with minimal attribution requirements.

Quickstart

from indic_transliteration import sanscript

data = 'idam adbhutam'
result = sanscript.transliterate(data, sanscript.HK, sanscript.TELUGU)
print(result)  # ఇదమ్ అద్భుతమ్

Verify before relying

• Whether Python version requirements are enforced (requires_python is unspecified in metadata)
• Performance characteristics with large texts or many concurrent transliterations
• Completeness of Dravidian language extensions beyond the examples shown

Package facts

Evidence: indic_transliteration-2.3.82-py3-none-any.whl

Keywords: indic, script, transliteration, hindi, sanskrit, samskritam, kannada, devanagari, tamil, malayalam, telugu, gurumukhi, gujarati, bengali, oriya, -, Harvard-Kyoto, IAST, Roman-Unicode), SLP1, WX

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