Command-Line Options

LanguageTool can be started from the command line. You need to specify a filename of the text file to be checked or tagged, or you can use standard input by omitting the filename).

Option/Parameter	Explanation
–-help, -–?, -h, -help	Display short usage message.
-	New in 0.9.8. Use standard input instead of a file.
–-api	Display LanguageTool output in the special XML API format.
-a, -–apply	New in 0.9.8. Use the rules to correct the text directly rather than display suggestions. Note: rules that don't offer corrections are silently ignored. You might use this option to automatically edit the files. Caveat: you might want to select only some very reliable rules to avoid possible false positives.
-b	Make single line break a paragraph break. By default, a paragraph break is introduced only after two line breaks. If your input is a list of unrelated lines that contain full sentences, you might want to use this parameter.
-c, –-encoding	Text encoding. All Java-recognized encodings are accepted.
-d, –-disable	Disable specified rules when checking. Rules are delimited with a comma (,). Note: you cannot specify both enabled and disabled rules at the same time.
-e, –-enable	Enable only specified rules, delimited with a comma (,). Note: you cannot specify both enabled and disabled rules at the same time.
-l, –-language	Text language.
-m, –-mothertongue	User's mother tongue. Used for scanning for false friends.
-r, –-recursive	Run LanguageTool recursively on a set of files.
-t, –-taggeronly	Use LanguageTool to tag the text. No check is executed.
-u, –-list-unknown	List words unknown to LanguageTool tagger. Useful for checking the coverage of the tagger. Note: you cannot specify –-taggeronly and –-list-unknown at the same time. In the tagging mode, untagged words are visible anyway as untagged words, so the parameter makes no sense.
-v, –-verbose	Verbose mode: display POS tags assigned by LanguageTool. The POS tags are output to stderr (you can pipe them to a file using 2> file).

Examples

• Run LanguageTool on a Polish text:

java -jar LanguageTool.jar -l pl polishfile.txt

• Tag UTF-8 encoded Polish text:

java -jar LanguageTool.jar -l pl -c UTF-8 -t polishfile.txt

• Use verbose mode to see the tags to test rules interactively:

java -jar LanguageTool.jar -l en -v -b -

This mode of operation can be useful to see the tags immediately after inputting the text on the keyboard and see why a given rule doesn't work as expected.