Correct commonly misspelled English words... quickly.
$ misspell all.html your.txt important.md files.go
your.txt:42:10 found "langauge" a misspelling of "language"
# ^ file, line, column
You'll need golang 1.5 or newer installed to compile
it. But after that it's a standalone binary.
If people want pre-compiled binaries, file a
ticket please.
FAQ
How can I make the corrections automatically?
Just add the -w
flag!
$ misspell -w all.html your.txt important.md files.go
your.txt:9:21:corrected "langauge" to "language"
# ^booyah
How do I convert British spellings to American (or vice-versa)?
Add the -locale US
flag!
$ misspell -locale US important.txt
important.txt:10:20 found "colour" a misspelling of "color"
Add the -locale UK
flag!
$ echo "My favorite color is blue" | misspell -locale UK
stdin:1:3:found "favorite color" a misspelling of "favourite colour"
Help is appreciated as I'm neither British nor an
expert in the English language.
How do you check an entire folder recursively?
Just list a directory you'd like to check
misspell .
misspell aDirectory anotherDirectory aFile
You can also run misspell recursively using the following shell tricks:
misspell directory/**/*
or
find . -type f | xargs misspell
Yes!
Print messages to stderr
only:
$ echo "zeebra" | misspell
stdin:1:0:found "zeebra" a misspelling of "zebra"
Print messages to stderr
, and corrected text to stdout
:
$ echo "zeebra" | misspell -w
stdin:1:0:corrected "zeebra" to "zebra"
zebra
Only print the corrected text to stdout
:
$ echo "zeebra" | misspell -w -q
zebra
Are there special rules for golang source files?
Yes! If the file ends in .go
, then misspell will only check spelling in
comments.
If you want to force a file to be checked as a golang source, use -source=go
on the command line. Conversely, you can check a golang source as if it were
pure text by using -source=text
. You might want to do this since many
variable names have misspellings in them!
I'm told the using -source=go
works well for ruby, javascript, java, c and
c++.
It doesn't work well for python and bash.
gometalinter runs
multiple golang linters. Starting on 2016-06-12
gometalinter supports misspell
natively but it is disabled by default.
# update your copy of gometalinter
go get -u github.com/alecthomas/gometalinter
# install updates and misspell
gometalinter --install --update
To use, just enable misspell
gometalinter --enable misspell ./...
Note that gometalinter only checks golang files, and uses the default options
of misspell
You may wish to run this on your plaintext (.txt) and/or markdown files too.
<a name="csv"
How Can I Get CSV Output?
Using -f csv
, the output is standard comma-seprated values with headers in the first row.
misspell -f csv *
file,line,column,typo,corrected
"README.md",9,22,langauge,language
"README.md",47,25,langauge,language
<a name="sqlite"
How can I export to SQLite3?
Using -f sqlite
, the output is a sqlite3 dump-file.
$ misspell -f sqlite * > /tmp/misspell.sql
$ cat /tmp/misspell.sql
PRAGMA foreign_keys=OFF;
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
CREATE TABLE misspell(
"file" TEXT,
"line" INTEGER,i
"column" INTEGER,i
"typo" TEXT,
"corrected" TEXT
);
INSERT INTO misspell VALUES("install.txt",202,31,"immediatly","immediately");
# etc...
COMMIT;
$ sqlite3 -init /tmp/misspell.sql :memory: 'select count(*) from misspell'
1
With some tricks you can directly pipe output to sqlite3 by using -init /dev/stdin
:
misspell -f sqlite * | sqlite3 -init /dev/stdin -column -cmd '.width 60 15' ':memory' \
'select substr(file,35),typo,count(*) as count from misspell group by file, typo order by count desc;'
Using the -f template
flag you can pass in a
golang text template to format the output.
One can use printf "%q" VALUE
to safely quote a value.
The default template is compatible with gometalinter
{{ .Filename }}:{{ .Line }}:{{ .Column }}:corrected {{ printf "%q" .Original }} to "{{ printf "%q" .Corrected }}"
To just print probable misspellings:
-f '{{ .Original }}'
What problem does this solve?
This corrects commonly misspelled English words in computer source
code, and other text-based formats (.txt
, .md
, etc).
It is designed to run quickly so it can be
used as a pre-commit hook
with minimal burden on the developer.
It does not work with binary formats (e.g. Word, etc).
It is not a complete spell-checking program nor a grammar checker.
What are other misspelling correctors and what's wrong with them?
Some other misspelling correctors:
They all work but had problems that prevented me from using them at scale:
- slow, all of the above check one misspelling at a time (i.e. linear) using regexps
- not MIT/Apache2 licensed (or equivalent)
- have dependencies that don't work for me (python3, bash, linux sed, etc)
- don't understand American vs. British English and sometimes makes unwelcome "corrections"
That said, they might be perfect for you and many have more features
than this project!
How fast is it?
Misspell is Easily 100x to 1000x faster than other spelling correctors. You
should be able to check and correct 1000 files in under 250ms.
This uses the mighty power of golang's
strings.Replacer which is
a implementation or variation of the
Aho–Corasick algorithm.
This makes multiple substring matches simultaneously
In addition this uses multiple CPU cores to work on multiple files.
What problems does it have?
Unlike the other projects, this doesn't know what a "word" is. There may be
more false positives and false negatives due to this. On the other hand, it
sometimes catches things others don't.
Either way, please file bugs and we'll fix them!
Since it operates in parallel to make corrections, it can be non-obvious to
determine exactly what word was corrected.
It's making mistakes. How can I debug?
Run using -debug
flag on the file you want. It should then print what word
it is trying to correct. Then file a
bug describing the problem.
Thanks!
Why is it making mistakes or missing items in golang files?
The matching function is case-sensitive, so variable names that are multiple
worlds either in all-upper or all-lower case sometimes can cause false
positives. For instance a variable named bodyreader
could trigger a false
positive since yrea
is in the middle that could be corrected to year
.
Other problems happen if the variable name uses a English contraction that
should use an apostrophe. The best way of fixing this is to use the
Effective Go naming
conventions and use
camelCase for variable names. You
can check your code using golint
What license is this?
MIT
Where do the word lists come from?
It started with a word list from
Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, this list had to be highly edited as many of the words are
obsolete or based from mistakes on mechanical typewriters (I'm guessing).
Additional words were added based on actually mistakes seen in
the wild (meaning self-generated).
Variations of UK and US spellings are based on many sources including:
American English is more accepting of spelling variations than is British
English, so "what is American or not" is subject to opinion. Corrections and help welcome.
### What are some other enhancements that could be done?
Here's some ideas for enhancements:
Capitalization of proper nouns could be done (e.g. weekday and month names, country names, language names)
Opinionated US spellings US English has a number of words with alternate
spellings. Think adviser vs.
advisor. While "advisor" is not wrong, the opinionated US
locale would correct "advisor" to "adviser".
Versioning Some type of versioning is needed so reporting mistakes and errors is easier.
Feedback Mistakes would be sent to some server for agregation and feedback review.
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