Command line

The araclean command normalizes text from the shell — no Python required. It lives behind the [cli] extra:

pip install 'araclean[cli]'

It is a thin adapter over the same core the Python API uses: arguments are validated once, the pipeline is built once, then text streams through it line by line — so a corpus larger than memory works without further ceremony. Every flag is listed in the CLI reference, which is generated from the command itself.

Files, stdin, stdout

With no input argument (or -), araclean normalize reads stdin and writes stdout, so it drops into a pipe like any Unix tool:

$ printf 'اَلسّلامُ عليكم\nالعـــربية\n' | araclean normalize --profile search
السلام عليكم
العربيه

Pass a file to read it, and --output to write a file instead of stdout:

$ araclean normalize corpus.txt --profile search --output corpus.clean.txt

Line endings are preserved per line, and all I/O is UTF-8.

Choosing and tuning a profile

--profile / -p picks the named profile (default light — lossless encoding repair). Every per-knob override from the Python API has a flag twin, and the same validation applies: a flag that does not apply to the chosen profile is rejected with a clear error before any input is read, never silently ignored.

$ printf '٢٠٢٤\n' | araclean normalize -p ml --map-digits
2024
$ printf 'كِتَابٌ في مَدْرَسَةٍ\n' | araclean normalize -p search --teh-marbuta keep
كتاب في مدرسة
$ printf 'نص\n' | araclean normalize -p light --emoji strip
error: override(s) ['emoji'] do not apply to profile 'light': it has no matching step to configure.

See Tuning profiles for what each knob does and which profile owns it.

JSONL corpora

Most real corpora are JSON Lines. --jsonl parses each line as a JSON object, normalizes one string field in place (default text, change it with --field), and re-emits the record with everything else untouched:

$ printf '{"id": 1, "text": "العـــربية"}\n' | araclean normalize --jsonl --field text
{"id": 1, "text": "العربية"}

Arabic is emitted verbatim (not \uXXXX-escaped). A malformed line — invalid JSON, or a missing / non-string field — stops the run with an error naming the line number, so a silent half-cleaned corpus cannot happen. Blank lines pass through unchanged.

Exit status & errors

Code	Meaning
0	Success.
1	A streaming failure: unreadable input/output, or an invalid --jsonl record.
2	Invalid options (unknown profile, knob, or value), or the [cli] extra is not installed.

Errors go to stderr; stdout carries only normalized text, so redirecting output stays safe even when a run fails.