This blog desperately needs a spellchecker
Okay, I just saw one of my posts being quoted on another blog and I immediately noticed how atrocious my spelling is ("vocabularly"??!). How hard is it to add a spellchecker? I've got the .dict files from the OpenOffice.org site (or rather, I had... they were blown away on my old HD... it'll be easy enough to grab again). Does anyone know of a decent way to parse text and compare with a 60,000 word dictionary file?
1) Are there implementations like this out there on the Internet already - for server side and in Java and 2) if not, does anyone know off the top of their head an algorithm for doing this efficiently? I'm crap with algorithms (having mistakenly gone to school for Journalism) so I always end up doing loops the slowest way possible until someone gives me a slap upside the head and points out something that any CompSci major knew in the first year...
-Russ
By the way, not to make any excuses, but honestly, learning Spanish is the cause of my shitty spelling lately. I used to be an Editor for god's sake! I just can't "see" when words are spelled wrong any more... They used to just pop out at me, but not any more. Also my "finger habits" are going away as I get more used to typing Spanish... Whereas before a "-tion" at the end of the word used to be like one action, it's now a pause, a thought, and a question in my mind whether it's a "-tion" or a "-c�on" ). It also doesn't help that I'm now typing on a Spanish keyboard and most of the keys having symbols that don't correspond to the U.S. English keyboard I've got it mapped to. (#1 Rule: don't look down!) Anyways, this is all more reasons for me to add a spellchecker and quick.
Later... Awesome! Rickard just left me a link for Jazzy - Java Spell Check API on SourceForge. Looking at it now...