# pycantonese.read_chat

pycantonese.read_chat(path: str, match: str = None, exclude: str = None, encoding: str = 'utf-8') → pycantonese.corpus.CHATReader

  Read Cantonese CHAT data files.

  Parameters
    path str

      A path that points to one of the following:

      - ZIP file. Either a local `.zip` file path or a URL (one that begins with `"https://"` or `"http://"`). URL example: `"https://childes.talkbank.org/data/Biling/YipMatthews.zip"`

      - A local directory, for files under this directory recursively.

      - A single `.cha` CHAT file.

    match str, optional

      If provided, only the file paths that match this string (by regular expression matching) are read and parsed. For example, to work with the American English dataset Brown (containing data for the children Adam, Eve, and Sarah), you can pass in `"Eve"` here to only handle the data for Eve, since the unzipped Brown data from CHILDES has a directory structure of `Brown/Eve/xxx.cha` for Eve’s data. If this parameter is not specified or `None` is passed in (the default), such file path filtering does not apply.

    exclude str, optional

      If provided, the file paths that match this string (by regular expression matching) are excluded for reading and parsing.

    encoding str, optional

      Text encoding to parse the CHAT data. The default value is `"utf-8"` for Unicode UTF-8.

  Returns
    `CHATReader`