Re: Spellcheck a list
Re: Spellcheck a list
- Subject: Re: Spellcheck a list
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 04 Oct 2004 11:08:49 -0700
On 10/4/04 9:07 AM, "Graff" <email@hidden> wrote:
> On Oct 4, 2004, at 9:06 AM, Jan Steinman wrote:
>
>>> From: Graff <email@hidden>
>>>
>>> you can use the "grep" command:
>>> ...
>>> do shell script "grep " & quotedWord & " /usr/share/dict/words"
>>>
>>> With a bit of regular expressions thrown in you could have a decently
>>> powerful spell checker.
>>
>> If you aren't going to use regular expressions, then fgrep(1) is much
>> faster than grep, although the difference is hardly noticeable unless
>> you're really crunching a huge file. ("f" as is "fixed strings" as
>> opposed to regular expressions.)
>
> I did use a regular expression. I added the start-of-line marker "^"
> and the end-of-line marker "$" to the string before I quoted it. I did
> this so that I would get only unique matches rather than any line that
> contained the string. For example:
>
> using:
> grep '^youth$' /usr/share/dict/words
> gives me:
> youth
>
> using:
> fgrep 'youth' /usr/share/dict/words
> gives me:
> overyouthful
> preyouthful
> reyouth
> unyouthful
> unyouthfully
> youth
> youthen
> youthful
> youthfullity
> youthfully
> youthfulness
> youthhead
> youthheid
> youthhood
> youthily
> youthless
> youthlessness
> youthlike
> youthlikeness
> youthsome
> youthtide
> youthwort
> youthy
>
youthy? youthily? youthwort? youthen? unyouthfully? preyouthful?
What nonsense is all this? These aren't real words. They're stupid guesses
made by a computer which has been told how to add suffixes and prefixes to
root words to make putative parts of speech which _might_ be words, but
patently are not so for most root words - including "youth".
This is not something which should be used by anyone looking for a proper
spellchecker. It's a joke. Using grep looking for specific words with it
should be OK. Otherwise the other options in this thread sound much more
promising - especially the xspell osax since it apparently uses OS X's own
spellchecker which is much better than this stuff.
--
Paul Berkowitz
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