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.
Build only dependencies:
g++ make autoconf automake autopoint libtool wget catch
Runtime dependencies:
| Mandatory | Optional | |
|---|---|---|
| libhunspell 1 | ||
| cmd line tool 1 | libiconv gettext | ncurses readline |
| libhunspell 2 | boost-locale | |
| cmd line tool 2 |
Recommended tools for developers:
vim qtcreator clang-format cppcheck gdb libtool-bin doxygen plantuml
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 libboost-locale-dev \
libboost-system-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)
In Ubuntu, the packages are:
libncurses5-dev libreadline-dev
On macOS for compiler always use clang and not g++ because Homebrew
dependencies are build with that.
brew install autoconf automake libtool gettext boost
brew link gettext --force
Then run the standard trio: autoreconf, configure, make. See above.
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-boost
Open Mingw-w64 Win64 prompt and compile the same way as on Linux, see above.
Download and install Cygwin environment for Windows with the following extra packages:
- make
- automake
- autoconf
- libtool
- gcc-g++ development package
- boost
- ncurses, readline (for user interface)
- iconv (character conversion)
Then compile the same way as on Linux. Cygwin builds depend on Cygwin1.dll.
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 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
features and dictionary format:
man 5 hunspell
man hunspell
hunspell -h
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.
Doxygen will use Graphviz for generating all sorts of graphs and PlantUML
for generating UML diagrams. Make sure that the packages plantuml and graphviz are installed before running Doxygen. The latter is usually installed automatically
when installing Doxygen.
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.
Including in your program:
#include <hunspell.hxx>
Linking with Hunspell static library:
g++ -lhunspell-1.6 example.cxx
# or better, use pkg-config
g++ $(pkg-config --cflags --libs hunspell) example.cxx
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