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.
- Questions, ideas, or want to contribute? Join the Philterd Slack workspace to connect with other users and developers.
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.