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 |
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