Command-Line Interface¶

disarm provides a command-line tool for transliteration, slugification, normalization, and text processing. It reads from arguments or stdin and writes to stdout, making it composable with other Unix tools.

Installation¶

pip install disarm

After installation, the disarm command is available:

disarm t "café"
# cafe

You can also run it as a Python module:

python -m disarm t "café"

Commands¶

Every command has a short alias for faster typing in pipelines.

Command	Alias	Description
transliterate	t	Convert Unicode text to ASCII
slugify	s	Generate URL-safe slugs
normalize	n	Apply Unicode normalization
pipeline	p	Run multi-step text processing
demojize	d	Expand emoji to text descriptions

---

transliterate (t)¶

Convert Unicode text to ASCII using language-aware transliteration tables.

disarm t "café résumé"
# cafe resume

disarm t "Москва"
# Moskva

disarm t "北京市"
# bei jing shi

Options:

--lang CODE

Apply language-specific transliteration rules. Use auto for script-based detection.

disarm t --lang de "Ärger über Ölförderung"
# Aerger ueber Oelfoerderung

disarm t --lang auto "Москва"
# Moskva

--target CODE

Reverse transliteration — convert romanized Latin text back to a native script. Mutually exclusive with --lang.

disarm t --target ru "Moskva"
# Москва

disarm t --target el "Athina"
# Αθηνα

--tones

Include tone marks in Chinese pinyin output.

disarm t --tones "北京"
# běi jīng

--strict-iso9

Use the scholarly ASCII (ISO 9-style) transliteration for Cyrillic. NOTE: ASCII digraphs (zh/ch/sh), not the diacritic ISO 9:1995 standard.

disarm t --strict-iso9 "Юрий"
# Ûrij

--gost7034

Use GOST R 7.0.34 transliteration for Cyrillic.

---

slugify (s)¶

Generate URL-safe slugs from Unicode text.

disarm s "Hello, World!"
# hello-world

disarm s "Ärger im Büro"
# arger-im-buro

disarm s --lang de "Ärger im Büro"
# aerger-im-buero

Options:

--lang CODE

Language-specific transliteration before slugification.

--separator CHAR

Separator character (default: -).

disarm s --separator "_" "Hello World"
# hello_world

--max-length N

Maximum slug length.

disarm s --max-length 10 "A very long blog post title"
# a-very-lon

---

normalize (n)¶

Apply Unicode normalization.

disarm n "café"
# café  (NFC — composed form, the default)

disarm n --form NFKC "fi"
# fi

disarm n --form NFD "é"
# é  (two codepoints: e + combining acute accent)

Options:

--form {NFC,NFD,NFKC,NFKD}

Normalization form (default: NFC).

---

pipeline (p)¶

Run multiple processing steps in a single pass.

disarm p --steps "normalize,fold_case,transliterate" "Héllo WÖRLD"
# hello world

disarm p --steps "normalize,strip_accents,fold_case" "Café Résumé"
# cafe resume

Options:

--steps STEPS

Comma-separated list of processing steps (required).

Available steps: normalize, transliterate, fold_case, collapse_whitespace, strip_accents, confusables, strip_control, strip_zero_width, demojize.

--form FORM

Normalization form when using the normalize step.

---

demojize (d)¶

Expand emoji to their text descriptions.

disarm d "Hello 😀 World 🌍"
# Hello grinning face World globe showing Europe-Africa

---

Piping and stdin¶

All commands accept input from stdin when no positional argument is given. This makes disarm composable with other tools:

# Process a file
cat names.txt | disarm t

# Chain with other commands
echo "Ünïcödé Tëxt" | disarm t
# Unicode Text

# Slugify each line of a file
while IFS= read -r line; do
    echo "$line" | disarm s
done < titles.txt

# Use with xargs
cat words.txt | xargs -I{} disarm t "{}"

# Combine with sort/uniq for deduplication
cat entries.txt | disarm t | sort -u

Exit codes¶

Code	Meaning
0	Success
1	No input provided (no argument and no stdin)
2	Invalid arguments (unknown command, bad option)