PyArabic
Arabic text tools for Python
Decision gist · record as of 2026-08-14
Yes, if you need stable Arabic text manipulation and the existing feature set meets your requirements. The low install friction and lack of security vulnerabilities make it safe to use. However, the abandoned maintenance status means no bug fixes or updates will be forthcoming—do not install if you expect ongoing support or compatibility with future Python versions. Suitable for production use only in stable, unchanging workflows.AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying
Before you install
- Requires Python with Unicode support (native in Python 3; Python 2 requires proper encoding declarations).
- Arabic text must be defined with u'' prefix or UTF-8 encoding declaration.
- Install friction is low; the package depends only on six.
License · maintenance · safety
GPL (copyleft) — PyArabic is licensed under GPL (copyleft). Any derivative work or distribution must also be released under GPL; proprietary or closed-source projects cannot incorporate it without legal risk.
last release 2022-06-18 (1518 days)
0 known vulnerabilities (OSV.dev, 2026-08-14) · 152,348 downloads/mo, #10,905 on PyPI
Alternatives
Verify before relying
pip install pyarabic
import pyarabic.araby as araby
text = u'السلام عليكم'
stripped = araby.strip_tashkeel(text)- Whether the package works reliably with modern Python versions (3.9+) given its abandoned status.
- Performance characteristics when processing large Arabic corpora.
- Compatibility with recent versions of the six dependency.
What it is and what it does
PyArabic is a specialized library for processing Arabic text in Python. It provides a collection of functions organized into modules—araby.py for general text operations (stripping diacritics, tokenization, character classification), number.py for converting between numerals and Arabic words, and named.py for named-entity recognition. The library works with Unicode-encoded Arabic strings and handles Arabic-specific challenges like ligatures, hamza variants, and diacritical marks (harakat).
The package is designed for developers building Arabic natural language processing pipelines, text normalization workflows, or linguistic analysis tools. It depends only on six and installs with low friction. However, the project is abandoned—the last release was over four years ago—so it receives no maintenance, bug fixes, or updates. It is suitable only for stable use cases where the existing feature set is sufficient.
Use it for
- Strip diacritical marks from Arabic text for stemming or lemmatization in search or NLP pipelines.
- Tokenize Arabic documents into words or sentences for text analysis or corpus processing.
- Normalize Arabic script variants (hamza, ligatures) to standardize text before comparison or indexing.
- Convert numeric values to Arabic words or extract numeric phrases from Arabic text for document parsing.
- Classify and detect Arabic letters and character groups for text validation or linguistic analysis.
Worth the install?
AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page. Verify before relying on it.
Yes, if you need stable Arabic text manipulation and the existing feature set meets your requirements.
The low install friction and lack of security vulnerabilities make it safe to use. However, the abandoned maintenance status means no bug fixes or updates will be forthcoming—do not install if you expect ongoing support or compatibility with future Python versions. Suitable for production use only in stable, unchanging workflows.
Install
pyarabic on PyPI
Before you install
Install friction is low; the package depends only on six. However, maintenance is abandoned—the last release was 1518 days ago, and no recent commits or updates are evident. Use only if the existing functionality meets your needs without expecting bug fixes or feature additions.
Requires Python with Unicode support (native in Python 3; Python 2 requires proper encoding declarations). Arabic text must be defined with u'' prefix or UTF-8 encoding declaration.
License in practice
PyArabic is licensed under GPL (copyleft). Any derivative work or distribution must also be released under GPL; proprietary or closed-source projects cannot incorporate it without legal risk.
Quickstart
pip install pyarabic
import pyarabic.araby as araby
text = u'السلام عليكم'
stripped = araby.strip_tashkeel(text)Verify before relying
- Whether the package works reliably with modern Python versions (3.9+) given its abandoned status.
- Performance characteristics when processing large Arabic corpora.
- Compatibility with recent versions of the six dependency.
Package facts
| License | GPL copyleft |
| Python support | Not specified |
| Install friction | Low. Pure-Python wheel |
| Runtime dependencies | 1 packagesix |
| Maintenance | Abandoned 1,518 days since the last release |
| First released | |
| Downloads | 152,348 / month, #10,905 on PyPI 30-day window, as of 2026-08-14 |
| Known vulnerabilities | None known OSV.dev, checked 2026-08-14 |
| Classifiers | Development Status :: 5 - Production/StableIntended Audience :: DevelopersNatural Language :: ArabicOperating System :: OS IndependentProgramming Language :: PythonProgramming Language :: Python :: 2Programming Language :: Python :: 3Topic :: Text Processing :: Linguistic |
Evidence: PyArabic-0.6.15-py3-none-any.whl
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