Google Toolbar Spell Check API

I saw in this post that the Google toolbar could be extracted and looked at. So, I spend an afternoon reverse engineering the spell checker api. The api ends up to be very easy to use. Checking is done with an HTTP post to http://www.google.com/tbproxy/spell?lang=en&hl=en. The xml structure looks like this...
 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<spellrequest textalreadyclipped="0" ignoredups="0" ignoredigits="1" ignoreallcaps="1">
    <text>Ths is a tst</text>
</spellrequest>
 
The response look like ...
 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<spellresult error="0" clipped="0" charschecked="12">
    <c o="0" l="3" s="1">This Th's Thus Th HS</c>
    <c o="9" l="3" s="1">test tat ST St st</c>
</spellresult>
 
Tag
Description
o
the offset from the start of the text of the word
l
length of misspelled word
s
Confidence of the suggestion
text
tab delimited list of suggestions
 
I created a complete C# GoogleSpell library as a demo. The library can be download at http://www.loresoft.com/files/uploads/GoogleSpell.zip
 
Here is an example on how to use GoogleSpell …
 
string text = "ths is a tst";
SpellRequest request = new SpellRequest(text);

SpellResult result = SpellCheck.Check(request);

foreach (SpellCorrection correction in result.Corrections)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Misspelled: {0} ({1}:{2})", 
        text.Substring(correction.Offset, correction.Length), 
        correction.Offset, correction.Length);

    foreach(string suggestion in correction.Suggestions)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("    {0}", suggestion);
    }
}
 
I plan to develop an ajax web client for the google spell api.  This will be really sweet as it won't require anything to be installed on the sever other then a js file.  I'll post again when I have the web client complete.
 
~ Paul

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