A library to deidentify and redact PII, PHI, and other sensitive information from text.
- Full guides, code examples, and the API reference live on the documentation website.
- Built by Philterd.
- Commercial support and consulting is available - contact us.
Phileas analyzes text searching for sensitive information such as email addresses, phone numbers, SSNs, credit card numbers, and many other types of PII/PHI. When sensitive information is identified, Phileas can manipulate it in a variety of ways: the information can be redacted, masked, hashed, or replaced with a static value. The user defines how to handle each type of sensitive information through policies (YAML or JSON).
Other capabilities include referential integrity for redactions, conditional logic for redactions, and a CLI.
Phileas requires no machine-learning dependencies (e.g. no ChatGPT/etc.) and is intended to be lightweight and easy to use.
pip install phileas-redactThis pulls in the phisql package, which supplies the catalog of redaction strategies and policy field names.
from phileas.policy.policy import Policy
from phileas.services.filter_service import FilterService
# Define a policy as a Python dict (or load from YAML)
policy_dict = {
"name": "my-policy",
"identifiers": {
"emailAddress": {
"emailAddressFilterStrategies": [{
"strategy": "REDACT",
"redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"
}]
},
"ssn": {
"ssnFilterStrategies": [{
"strategy": "REDACT",
"redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"
}]
}
}
}
policy = Policy.from_dict(policy_dict)
service = FilterService()
result = service.filter(
policy=policy,
context="my-context",
document_id="doc-001",
text="Contact john@example.com or call about SSN 123-45-6789."
)
print(result.filtered_text)
# Contact {{{REDACTED-email-address}}} or call about SSN {{{REDACTED-ssn}}}.
for span in result.spans:
print(f" [{span.filter_type}] '{span.text}' -> '{span.replacement}' at {span.character_start}:{span.character_end}")| Guide | |
|---|---|
| Installation | Requirements and installing from source |
| Quick start | A first filter, step by step |
| Policies | Policy structure, strategies, conditions, ignored terms |
| Filters | Every supported type of sensitive information and its options |
| Examples | Recipes for common tasks |
| CLI | Redacting files from the command line, and evaluation mode |
| API reference | FilterService, Policy, Span, and the context services |
git clone https://github.com/philterd/phileas-python.git
cd phileas-python
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/Copyright 2026 Philterd, LLC.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for details.
"Phileas" and "Philter" are registered trademarks of Philterd, LLC.