langhint — language detection API

Detection runs against the live API.

Run a detection to see the result.

Coverage

Detects 54 languages

Assembly

Batchfile

C

C#

C++

Clojure

CMake

COBOL

CoffeeScript

CSS

CSV

Dart

DM

Dockerfile

Elixir

Erlang

Fortran

Go

Groovy

Haskell

HTML

INI

Java

JavaScript

JSON

Julia

Kotlin

Lisp

Lua

Makefile

Markdown

Matlab

Objective-C

OCaml

Pascal

Perl

PHP

PowerShell

Prolog

Python

R

Ruby

Rust

Scala

Shell

SQL

Swift

TeX

TOML

TypeScript

Verilog

Visual Basic

XML

YAML

Reference

The API in 30 seconds

Base URL https://api.langhint.com. Send the raw source code as the request body, get JSON back. No authentication required; CORS is open, so you can call it from the browser.

POST/detect

Classify a source code string and return the most likely language plus alternatives.

Request body

The raw source code (Content-Type: text/plain) — required, must be non-empty. No JSON wrapper, no escaping.

Query parameters

Name	Type		Description
max_candidates	number	optional	Maximum number of candidates to return, 1–10. Defaults to `3`.

Request

curl -X POST "https://api.langhint.com/detect?max_candidates=3" \
  --data-binary 'SELECT id, name FROM users WHERE active = 1'

curl --data-binary @query.sql \
  "https://api.langhint.com/detect?max_candidates=3"

Example response

# 200 OK
{
  "language": "sql",           // most likely language (lowercase id)
  "probability": 0.97,        // probability of the top result (0–1)
  "candidates": [             // up to max_candidates, sorted desc
    { "language": "sql", "probability": 0.97 },
    { "language": "ini", "probability": 0.01 }
  ]
}

Status codes

200 — language detected, body as above
400 — request body is empty
422 — validation failed (e.g. max_candidates out of range)

GET/health

Liveness probe for monitoring and uptime checks. Takes no parameters.

# 200 OK
{ "status": "ok" }

GET/docs

Interactive OpenAPI (Swagger) documentation, auto-generated from the service — open /docs ↗.

Detect the language of any code via a free API

Detects 54 languages

The API in 30 seconds