SpellCheck (re-inventing the wheel)

[Sivakatirswami]

Alex:

Thanks *so* much for this... I really need it... if anyone gets their 
head around some fast algorithms for  pulling up a short suggestion 
list before I do, please post it.

My context is that most words that the users will mis-spell are 
specialized (sanskrit, tamil, names of obscure places e.g. "Chennai" ). 
So, where an obvious mis-spelling like "mikl " the user will know how 
to change to "milk"-- for the specialized words, she will need to see a 
selection of choices...

I know we could go "crazy" with this and code for auto replacement of 
the mis-spelled word, etc. which adds a new layer of complexity,  but 
for now I would be satisfied with manual user entry into a separate 
stack where they could enter 1, 2, 3 initial chars and get a list of 
words starting with those characters (99.9% of cases the first char is 
assured), a click down could put that on their clip board and they 
could paste it over the mis-spelled word. I would have our master 
all-publicaitions lexicon entries loaded-appended to that global 
variable gWords, to supplement  the main word list.

Or, we *could* go nuts and do some repeat loop with a word offset and 
replace all instances of the mis-spelled word if it exists etc..

Sivakatirswami
Himalayan Academy Publications
at Kauai's Hindu Monastery
katir at hindu.org
www.HimalayanAcademy.com,
www.HinduismToday.com
www.Gurudeva.org
www.Hindu.org

On Jan 27, 2005, at 3:14 PM, Alex Tweedly wrote:

> This took on average 8 millisecs per word in tWords. Perfectly 
> adequate for small input "documents".
>
> Then I tried a slightly more complex way:
> setup
>
>>   put url ("file:" & tFile) into gWords
>>   repeat for each word w in gWords
>>     put 1 into  gArray[w]
>>   end repeat
>
> and then
>
>>   put tWords into field "inField"
>>   put 0 into t
>>   repeat for each word w in tWords
>>     add 1 to t
>>     replace "." with empty in w
>>     replace "," with empty in w
>>     replace "!" with empty in w
>>     if gArray[w] <> 1 then
>>       set the textstyle of word t of field "inField" to "bold"
>>     end if
>>   end repeat
>
> This took 2 millisecs for 50 words, so would be reasonable for even 
> large-ish documents.