Nuspell is a fast and safe spelling checker software program. It is designed for languages with rich morphology and complex word compounding. Nuspell is written in modern C++ and it supports Hunspell dictionaries.
Main features of Nuspell spelling checker:
- Provides software library and command-line tool.
- Suggests high-quality spelling corrections.
- Backward compatibility with Hunspell dictionary file format.
- Up to 3 times faster than Hunspell.
- Full Unicode support backed by ICU.
- Twofold affix stripping (for agglutinative languages, like Azeri, Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, etc.).
- Supports complex compounds (for example, Hungarian, German and Dutch).
- Supports advanced features, for example: special casing rules (Turkish dotted i or German sharp s), conditional affixes, circumfixes, fogemorphemes, forbidden words, pseudoroots and homonyms.
- Free and open source software. Licensed under GNU LGPL v3 or later.
Build-only dependencies:
- C++ 17 compiler, GCC >= v7, Clang >= v5, MSVC >= 2017
- Cmake version 3.8 or newer
- Git
- Ronn
- Boost headers version 1.62 or newer
Run-time (and build-time) dependencies:
- icu4c
- boost-locale (needed only for the CLI tool, not the library)
Recommended tools for developers: qtcreator, ninja, clang-format, gdb, vim, doxygen.
We first need to download the dependencies. Some may already be preinstalled.
For Ubuntu and Debian:
sudo apt install git cmake libboost-locale-dev libicu-dev
Then run the following commands inside the Nuspell directory:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install
For faster build process run make -j
, or use Ninja instead
of Make.
If you are making a Linux distribution package (dep, rpm) you need some additional configurations on the CMake invocation. For example:
cmake .. -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=1 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
- Install Apple's Command-line tools.
- Install Homebrew package manager.
- Install dependencies with the next commands.
brew install cmake icu4c boost
export ICU_ROOT=$(brew --prefix icu4c)
Then run the standard cmake and make. See above. The ICU_ROOT variable
is needed because icu4c is keg-only package in Homebrew and CMake can
not find it by default. Alternatively, you can use -DICU_ROOT=...
on
the cmake command line.
If you want to build with GCC instead of Clang, you need to pull GCC with Homebrew and rebuild all the dependencies with it. See Homewbrew manuals.
- Install Visual Studio 2017 or newer. Alternatively, you can use Visual Studio Build Tools.
- Install Git for Windows and Cmake.
- Install vcpkg in some folder, e.g. in
c:\vcpkg
. - With vcpkg install: icu, boost-locale[icu].
- Run the commands bellow.
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=c:\vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake -A Win32
cmake --build .
Download MSYS2, update everything and install the following packages:
pacman -S base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-boost \
mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake
Then from inside the Nuspell folder run:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -G "Unix Makefiles"
make
make install
Download the above mentioned dependencies with Cygwin package manager. Then compile the same way as on Linux. Cygwin builds depend on Cygwin1.dll.
Install the following required packages
pkg cmake icu boost-libs catch
Then run the standard cmake and make as on Linux. See above.
The main executable is located in src/nuspell
.
After compiling and installing you can run the Nuspell spell checker with a Nuspell, Hunspell or Myspell dictionary:
nuspell -d en_US text.txt
For more details see the man-page.
Sample program:
#include <iostream>
#include <nuspell/dictionary.hxx>
#include <nuspell/finder.hxx>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
auto dict_finder = nuspell::Finder::search_all_dirs_for_dicts();
auto path = dict_finder.get_dictionary_path("en_US");
auto dict = nuspell::Dictionary::load_from_path(path);
auto word = string();
auto sugs = vector<string>();
while (cin >> word) {
if (dict.spell(word)) {
cout << "Word \"" << word << "\" is ok.\n";
continue;
}
cout << "Word \"" << word << "\" is incorrect.\n";
dict.suggest(word, sugs);
if (sugs.empty())
continue;
cout << " Suggestions are: ";
for (auto& sug : sugs)
cout << sug << ' ';
cout << '\n';
}
}
On the command line you can link like this:
g++ example.cxx -std=c++17 -lnuspell -licuuc -licudata
# or better, use pkg-config
g++ example.cxx -std=c++17 $(pkg-config --cflags --libs nuspell)
Within Cmake you can use find_package()
to link. For example:
find_package(Nuspell)
add_executable(myprogram main.cpp)
target_link_libraries(myprogram Nuspell::nuspell)
Myspell, Hunspell and Nuspell dictionaries:
https://github.com/nuspell/nuspell/wiki/Dictionaries-and-Contacts
First, always install the debugger:
sudo apt install gdb
For debugging we need to create a debug build and then we need to start
gdb
.
mkdir debug
cd debug
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
make -j
gdb src/nuspell/nuspell
We recommend debugging to be done with an IDE.
To run the tests, run the following command after building:
ctest
Full documentation in the wiki, which also holds the Code of Conduct.
API Documentation for developers can be generated from the source files by running:
doxygen
The result can be viewed by opening doxygen/html/index.html
in a web
browser.