An alternative, offline, regex-supporting, command-line interface to zdic (漢典), a comprehensive Chinese language dictionary, featuring:

• More than 460,000 entries
• No internet connection required
• Full text search with regex: a command for finding characters/phrases in body text of definitions.
• Colorful text for highlighting entries

Standalone version available for windows, mac and linux. Please refer to the Releases page.

zdic-cli runs as a REPL loop, and there are 5 types of commands you can enter:

def 甲        display entry for 甲
pre 甲        list words that starts with 甲
has 甲 乙 ... list words that contains 甲 and 乙 ...
txt 甲        list words whose full entry text contains 甲 (regex supported)
sel n         display entry at previously returned list index n

def is probably the most common one for simply looking up characters/words. pre has txt will return an enumerated list listing all eligible entries, and sel 0/sel 1/sel n can be used to select from the list.

This section is for compiling from source (and is somewhat complex), if you just would like to use the software, please check out the Releases page.

• node.js/npm
• python2. Tested on 2.7. It has to be python 2 instead of 3 because much of the data-processing work were done way back in a time when 2 was the norm. Sorry folks, but if you're a python3 purist feel free to send a PR!
• pkg (optional, to build standalone binaries for multiple platforms) npm install -g pkg

This repo does not contain the dictionary files themselves as they're too large. Instead, a shell script (setup.sh) is provided to automate the process:

• Automatically download the original Kindle dictionary format (.PRC) from the internet. The download link hardcoded in setup.sh might fail in the future, in which case a google search for 汉典.prc should yield alternative resources.
• Automatically download a python library (kroo/mobi-python) for parsing mobi files. A rather old library and have some oddities, so a find-and-replace script will be automatically run to patch some glitches in the source code :P
• python/to_txt.py is run to extract a raw txt file from the kindle format prc.
• phthon/to_json.py is run to generate a directory of json files from the txt to make lookup and formatting more efficient.

Run the shell script with:

sh setup.sh

At this point you'll have zdic.prc, zdic.txt and directory zdic_json/. Only zdic_json is needed, so if everything went well with the script, you can freely delete the other two and gain some 700MB of free space :)

At this point you can also run the software by simply doing:

node index.js

You can also package it into a binary using

pkg .

provided you have the node and pkg dependencies installed.

Tip: to run the software by typing zdic anywhere, you can symlink it to /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin, e.g.

ln -s path/to/zdic-cli/zdic-cli /usr/local/bin/zdic

Not affiliated with zdic.net, blah, blah...

MIT License only applies to the source code in this repo, the copyright of the text of the dictionary entries (not included in this repo) belongs to original author(s), blah, blah...