Capabilities — Overview

Each page below is a self-contained guide for one kind of identifier Paxman can canonicalize. Read the one that matches your data, copy the notebook snippet, and adapt the contract flags to your needs.

All capabilities share the same call shape — only the import, the factory, and the domain vocabulary change:

import paxman
from paxman.capabilities import X  # Email, Country, ...

paxman.register_all_shipped()  # once, before first use
contract = X.create_contract(...)  # domain flags here
result = paxman.canonicalize(text, contract)

For the shared concepts behind these pages see Contracts, Pipeline, Execution Result, and the API Reference.

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Choose by what you have

Your data looks like…	Read
user@example.com, user at example dot com	Email
2026-01-15, 01/02/2026, 2026/01/15	Date
US, United States, Alemania	Country
USD, $, euro, ¥ (identifiers without amounts)	Currency
192.168.1.1, 2001:db8::1	IP
9780306406157, 0306406152	ISBN
USD 500, $500, 1.000,50 EUR (currency with amount)	Money
+1 555 123 4567, (555) 234-5678, tel:+15551234567	Phone
kg, m/s², megahertz, kPa	SI Unit
https://example.com, http://münchen.de	URL
DEUTDEFF, DEUTDEFF500	BIC — guide forthcoming
48.8566, 2.3522, geo:48.8566,2.3522	Coordinates — guide forthcoming
Fe, iron, element 26	Element — guide forthcoming
DE89370400440532013000	IBAN — guide forthcoming
0317-8471	ISSN
en-US, eng, German	Language — guide forthcoming
00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E	MacAddress — guide forthcoming
0000-0002-1825-0097	ORCID — guide forthcoming

The set above reflects the current release. New capabilities are added in minor releases — check paxman.capabilities or the latest release notes if you don’t see what you need.

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What each page covers

Every capability page answers the same questions in the same order:

1. What it canonicalizes and what it explicitly does not.
2. Recognized forms — what patterns match, with what grammars.
3. Canonical output & output_format — default and offered renderings.
4. Contract flags — which knobs change recognition and validation.
5. Statuses — concrete SUCCESS / MISSING / INVALID / AMBIGUOUS examples.
6. Notebook snippet — runnable cleaning loop for a column.
7. Provenance — which specifications vouch for the answer.

Start with the capability that matches your column; if you need more than one, register both and loop per cell (see the Segmentation Recipe for text that mixes kinds).

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One mention per call

Paxman resolves one presumed entity per canonicalize() call (see Pipeline). Text that contains two different entities with different canonical values raises MultipleMentionsError rather than returning a merged answer — split first, then loop. To extract every mention in a longer text instead, use the batch API paxman.scan(), which returns per-capability Mention records (see API reference).

from paxman.core.errors import MultipleMentionsError

try:
    result = paxman.canonicalize("alice@example.com, bob@example.org", contract)
except MultipleMentionsError:
    # split the input and canonicalize each piece — see the segmentation recipe
    ...