CHAT2TEXT — CHAT to Plain Text
Status: Current
Purpose
Converts CHAT files into plain text lines suitable for downstream text analysis. The legacy manual describes CHAT2TEXT as converting a CHAT file to text lines for concordance programs such as AntConc, and says it is implemented as an alias of FLO with +cr +t*.
clan-core implements the same broad intent directly by extracting plain spoken text from the parsed CHAT AST.
Usage
chatter clan chat2text file.cha
chatter clan chat2text --include-speaker file.cha
Options
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
--include-speaker | Prefix each line with speaker code (e.g., “CHI: hello world”) |
Output
Plain text with one utterance per line. All CHAT annotations are stripped:
- Bracketed annotations (
[/],[: replacement],[*]) - Timing bullets
- Terminators (
.,?,!) - Fillers (
&-um), fragments (&+fr), events (&=laughs) - Untranscribed markers (
xxx,yyy,www) - Omitted words (
0word)
Differences from CLAN
- Manual intent: the
CLAN manual does have a
dedicated
CHAT2TEXTsection, and it describes the command as aFLO-based alias rather than as a separate semantic engine. - Uses AST-based content extraction for reliable annotation stripping.
- Does not model the legacy implementation literally as
flo +cr +t*; it performs the plain-text extraction directly.