About Hunspell

NOTICE: Version 2 is in the works. For contributing see version 2 specification and the folder src/hunspell2.

Hunspell is a spell checker and morphological analyzer library and program designed for languages with rich morphology and complex word compounding or character encoding. Hunspell interfaces: Ispell-like terminal interface using Curses library, Ispell pipe interface, C++ class and C functions.

Hunspell's code base comes from the OpenOffice.org MySpell (http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/MySpell-3.zip). See README.MYSPELL, AUTHORS.MYSPELL and license.myspell files. Hunspell is designed to eventually replace Myspell in OpenOffice.org.

Main features of Hunspell spell checker and morphological analyzer:

• Unicode support (affix rules work only with the first 65535 Unicode characters)
• Morphological analysis (in custom item and arrangement style) and stemming
• Max. 65535 affix classes and twofold affix stripping (for agglutinative languages, like Azeri, Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, etc.)
• Support complex compounds (for example, Hungarian and German)
• Support language specific features (for example, special casing of Azeri and Turkish dotted i, or German sharp s)
• Handle conditional affixes, circumfixes, fogemorphemes, forbidden words, pseudoroots and homonyms.
• Free software. Versions 1.x are licenced under LGPL, GPL, MPL tri-license. Version 2 is licenced only under GNU LGPL.

Dependencies

Build only dependencies:

g++ make autoconf automake autopoint libtool

Runtime dependencies:

	Mandatory	Optional
libhunspell 1
cmd line tool 1	libiconv	gettext ncurses readline
libhunspell 2	cppunit
cmd line tool 2

Recommended tools for developers:

vim qtcreator clang-format cppcheck

Compiling on GNU/Linux and Unixes

We first need to download the dependencies. On Linux, gettext and libiconv are part of the standard library. On other Unixes we need to manually install them.

For Ubuntu:

sudo apt install autoconf automake autopoint libtool libcppunit-dev

Then run the following commands:

autoreconf -vfi
./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

For dictionary development, use the --with-warnings option of configure.

For interactive user interface of Hunspell executable, use the --with-ui option.

Optional developer packages:

• ncurses (need for --with-ui), eg. libncursesw5 for UTF-8
• readline (for fancy input line editing, configure parameter: --with-readline)
• locale and gettext (but you can also use the --with-included-gettext configure parameter)

In Ubuntu, the packages are:

libncurses5-dev libreadline-dev

Compiling on OSX and macOS

On macOS for compiler always use clang and not g++ because Homebrew dependencies are build with that.

brew install autoconf automake libtool gettext pkg-config cppunit
brew link gettext --force

Then run the standard trio: autoreconf, configure, make. See above.

Compiling on Windows

1. Compiling with Mingw64 and MSYS2

Download Msys2, update everything and install the following packages:

pacman -S base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-libtool mingw-w64-x86_64-cppunit

Open Mingw-w64 Win64 prompt and compile the same way as on Linux, see above.

2. Compiling in Cygwin environment

Download and install Cygwin environment for Windows with the following extra packages:

• make
• automake
• autoconf
• libtool
• gcc-g++ development package
• ncurses, readline (for user interface)
• iconv (character conversion)

Then compile the same way as on Linux. Cygwin builds depend on Cygwin1.dll.

Debugging

It is recomended to install a debug build of the standard library:

libstdc++6-6-dbg

For debugging we need to create a debug build and then we need to start gdb.

./configure CXXFLAGS='-g -O0 -Wall -Wextra'
make
libtool --mode=execute gdb src/tools/hunspell

You can also pass the CXXFLAGS directly to make without calling ./configure, but we don't recommend this way during long development sessions.

If you like to develop and debug with an IDE, see documentation at https://github.com/hunspell/hunspell/wiki/IDE-Setup

Testing

Testing Hunspell (see tests in tests/ subdirectory):

make check

or with Valgrind debugger:

make check
VALGRIND=[Valgrind_tool] make check

For example:

make check
VALGRIND=memcheck make check

Documentation

features and dictionary format:

man 5 hunspell
man hunspell
hunspell -h

http://hunspell.github.io/

Usage

The src/tools directory contains ten executables after compiling.

• The main executable:
  • hunspell: main program for spell checking and others (see manual)
• Example tools:
  • analyze: example of spell checking, stemming and morphological analysis
  • chmorph: example of automatic morphological generation and conversion
  • example: example of spell checking and suggestion
• Tools for dictionary development:
  • affixcompress: dictionary generation from large (millions of words) vocabularies
  • makealias: alias compression (Hunspell only, not back compatible with MySpell)
  • wordforms: word generation (Hunspell version of unmunch)
  • hunzip: decompressor of hzip format
  • hzip: compressor of hzip format
  • munch (DEPRECATED, use affixcompress): dictionary generation from vocabularies (it needs an affix file, too).
  • unmunch (DEPRECATED, use wordforms): list all recognized words of a MySpell dictionary

After compiling and installing (see INSTALL) you can run the Hunspell spell checker (compiled with user interface) with a Hunspell or Myspell dictionary:

hunspell -d en_US text.txt

or without interface:

hunspell
hunspell -d en_UK -l <text.txt

Dictionaries consist of an affix and dictionary file, see tests/ or http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries.

Using Hunspell library with GCC

Including in your program:

#include <hunspell.hxx>

Linking with Hunspell static library:

g++ -lhunspell example.cxx 

Dictionaries

Myspell & Hunspell dictionaries:

• https://github.com/hunspell/hunspell/wiki/Dictionaries-and-Contacts
• https://github.com/hunspell/hunspell/wiki/Dictionary-Packages
• http://extensions.libreoffice.org
• http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/dictionaries
• http://extensions.openoffice.org
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries

Aspell dictionaries (need some conversion):

• ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict

Conversion steps: see relevant feature request at http://hunspell.github.io/ .

László Németh, nemeth at numbertext org

Chromium binary dictionaries

size_t len = 0;
const unsigned char * filec = file_content("<CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA>...\User Data\Dictionaries\ru-RU-3-0.bdic", &len);
Hunspell* pMS = new Hunspell(filec, len);

SP-Forth example: https://github.com/rufig/spf/blob/master/devel/~ac/lib/lin/spell/hunspell.f