Merge pull request #4 from alvations/patch-1

Added a check for the server status

Author: smilli

pycorenlp/corenlp.py

@@ -10,6 +10,15 @@ def __init__(self, server_url):
     def annotate(self, text, properties=None):
         if not properties:
             properties = {}
+            
+        # Checks that the Stanford CoreNLP server is started.
+        try:
+            requests.get(self.server_url).ok == True
+        except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError:
+            raise Exception('Check whether you have started the CoreNLP server e.g.\n'
+            '$ cd stanford-corenlp-full-2015-12-09/ \n'
+            '$ java -mx4g -cp "*" edu.stanford.nlp.pipeline.StanfordCoreNLPServer')
+        
         r = requests.get(
             self.server_url, params={
                 'properties': str(properties)