Spell Checker

[Austin]

Don't think there's one out there but I may be wrong...

I think it would be an awesome idea.  A few posters on my board really need it!  

[Gobalopper]

Hehe, talk to groundup he keeps saying he'll do it.

[Austin]

Would it be a hard one to do?  

[groundup]

I am so damn busy, I am not going to do a spell checker

[Gobalopper]

Ahh come on, I did all the hard work for you with those regex's.

[Galt]

I seem to recall reading a discussion of the difficulties involved in making a spell checker because you needed an external site to provide the actual dictionary.  Wouldn't it be possible to lift the dictionary from word or preferably some open source word processing software and use it as a db for the spell checker?

[groundup]

I seem to recall reading a discussion of the difficulties involved in making a spell checker because you needed an external site to provide the actual dictionary.  Wouldn't it be possible to lift the dictionary from word or preferably some open source word processing software and use it as a db for the spell checker?

linux has several dictionaries built in. problem being that php has problems with it. Since php4 is out, I wonder if it has fixed anything with pspell.. you can check.

[[Unknown]]

Yeah, well this part of the PHP manual on Pspell bothers me: (being a windows user)

Note:
This extension is not available on Windows platforms

-[Unknown]

[Gobalopper]

I think it works now but you have to compile php with it enabled or something and that isn't normally the default install. Maybe PHP5.

[Austin]

I know nothing about PHP, but would www.dictionary.com is an external site with a dictionary.

Thanks for the comments guys, I definitely feel this would be a useful mod.  

[irbrian]

pspell() sounds like a viable option for those who have access to their apache and php.ini files and so forth, but for the rest of us, I'm sure there are a couple of OS spell checking scripts/dictionaries out there. I'd do a search on sourceforge, hotscripts, et. al. -- but I'm due for a gaming session. I'll let someone else do it..

[groundup]

php uses linux's dictionaries.

[Greg Robson]

php uses linux's dictionaries.

If they use usr/dict/words then it only has about 22000 words by default.

I think my far the most easy to use and effective spellchecker (IMHO), would be the ability to select a word and they select "check word" and have it looked up on dictionary.com in a new windw

The only words that are spelt incorrectly are:
a) words we don't use often
b) normally have "(is that spelt right?)" written after them.

I'd definitely find that useful

[groundup]

That would be incredibly easy, Greg.

[Austin]

IMO it would be dumb to check a single word.  Not to put down your idea but people would want to spell check their whole post at one time, not one word at a time.