Browserify compatibility?

[ahamid]

Hello, natural looks like a great library and I am investigating using it in the browser, via Browserify.
I noticed a couple of things:

    $ gulp browserify
    module "WNdb" not found from "./node_modules/natural/lib/natural/wordnet/wordnet.js"
    ...
    module "lapack" not found from "./node_modules/natural/node_modules/sylvester/lib/node-sylvester/matrix.js"

WNdb module consists of a (large ~10mb) blob of data, while lapack which is a native library, is being pulled in by sylvester.

My understanding is that WNdb is optional in natural and lapack is optional in sylvester (it uses detection to fallback on pure JS routines). It appears that the problem may be with Browserify attempting to eagerly retrieve these dynamic dependencies. I will pursue a remedy within Browserify and log this issue in case I find a workaround, but I am wondering in parallel whether first class browser/Browserify will be a goal for natural.

[ahamid]

I believe I managed to solve this and at least tokenization appears to be working.
Leaving the breadcrumbs for others, this is simply a matter of using Browserify exclusions to exclude the 'WNdb' and 'lapack' nested dependencies:

var bundler = browserify(opts);
bundler.exclude('WNdb');
bundler.exclude('lapack');

Naturally WordNet will not be available, and presumably sylvester will fall back to pure JS routines.

[kkoch986]

Great, thanks for figuring that out! there was some discussion in #25 about the size of the library. Maybe this will help out some of them.

[tsjeyasarathi]

I tried suggestions in #25 but in vain. browserify creates a library but fs dependencies causes issues. Can someone help with the client side version of natural with classifier ?

[dspdog]

here is a client side version with most of the exports ~400kb before minifying; can use with var natural = require('natural');

https://gist.github.com/dspdog/105faa58bd8493c81f0b51bcc6046555