raspell

An interface binding for the Aspell spelling checker.

License

Copyright 2007 Cloudburst, LLC. Portions copyright 2005 Matthias Veit, Biro Eszter and used with permission. Licensed under the GPL 2.0. See included LICENSE file.

Requirements

Raspell requires Aspell version 0.6 (www.aspell.net) and at least one Aspell dictionary.

Mac:

sudo port install aspell aspell-dict-en

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install aspell libaspell-dev aspell-en

Installation

sudo gem install raspell

Usage

Aspell lets you check words and suggest corrections. For example:

require 'rubygems'
require 'raspell'

speller = Aspell.new("en_US")
speller.suggestion_mode = Aspell::NORMAL

string = "my haert wil go on"

string.gsub(/[\w\']+/) do |word| 
  if !speller.check(word) 
    # word is wrong
    puts "Possible correction for #{word}:"
    puts speller.suggest(word).first
  end
end

This outputs:

Possible correction for haert:
heart
Possible correction for wil:
Will

Note that suggest returns an array of suggestions even for words that are correctly spelled.

Options

The most useful options are suggestion_mode, and the passthrough option ignore_case. Passthrough options have to be set as so:

speller.set_option("ignore-case", "true")

See aspell.net/man-html/The-Options.html for a list of the passthrough options.

Futher resources