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Deno 2.2 Improves Dependency Management and Expands Node.js Compatibility
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@dcoffey/espells
Advanced tools
Pure JS/TS spellchecker, using Hunspell dictionaries. Based on Spylls.
Pure JS/TS spellchecker, using Hunspell dictionaries. Direct port of the Spylls library. Without zverok's (the author of Spylls) work, this library couldn't exist.
Espells makes no use of platform specific features that would prevent it from running within Node, a browser, or even a web worker. Effectively, it's just a pure spellchecking library and it's up to you to connect it to whatever interface you want.
Espells was created as part of my work on Wikijump.
Two main reasons:
To elaborate on that second point: libraries using Hunspell, or are compatible with Hunspell dictionaries, do exist. However, they're either incapable of handling many dictionaries, aren't fully featured, can only run in Node, or bastardize Hunspell to run in WASM, with mixed results. Espells doesn't have those problems.
Espells supports everything that Spylls support, which supports almost everything that Hunspell does. It reads the .dic
and .aff
formats that Hunspell expects. It can handle very complex languages, like the usual Italian .aff
, without crashing or using excessive memory.
npm install espells
You can get dictionaries very easily from NPM as well, see here for that.
Usage of Espells is incredibly simple. Its primary interface is the Espells
class exported by the module, which can be instantiated like so:
import { Espells } from "espells"
// the .aff and .dic should be given to Espells as a string or Uint8Array
// this special import just represents getting this data
import { aff, dic, dic2 } from "your-dictionary"
const spellchecker = new Espells({ aff, dic })
// alternatively, you can use a special async method to instantiate from URLs
const urlSpellchecker = await Espells.fromURL({
aff: "someurl.aff",
dic: "someurl.dic"
})
// finally, Espells supports loading multiple dictionaries at once
// this can be done with either the fromURL method or the normal constructor
const multipleSpellchecker = new Espells({ aff, dic: [dic, dic2] })
Espells is ready to use immediately. You can spellcheck a word like so:
const { correct, forbidden, warn } = spellchecker.lookup("word")
The forbidden
and warn
properties are special properties a "correctly spelled" word may have in Hunspell. Forbidden words are usually correct syntax wise, but aren't really considered real words, like "decreated". A word with warn: true
is technically a correctly spelled word, but usage of that specific word is usually a mistake.
Getting suggestions is simple as well:
// an array of strings
const suggestions = spellchecker.suggest("wodr")
There are quite a few other methods made available, specifically: addDictionary
, add
, remove
, stems
, and data
. These are fully documented in detailed tsdoc
comments.
Espells is welcome to PRs, issues, etc. Any contributions must maintain "parity" with Hunspell, although there is obviously some nuance to that idea.
If you want to understand how Espells work, the source files are fully documented. Additionally, you can take a look at Spylls' documentation for additional perspective and reasoning about certain technical details.
Espells is built using TypeScript, with no special build tools. You can use the following command:
npm run build
MPL 2.0. See the license file for more details.
FAQs
Pure JS/TS spellchecker, using Hunspell dictionaries. Based on Spylls.
We found that @dcoffey/espells demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 0 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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