I am looking for a way to, without custom defining a dictionary, to
get a list of suggested words for a misspelled word. Or better, "the"
most likely intended word for a misspelled word.

My base case to consider is:

dmr wjite saddle

which refers to a brand (DMR) and color (white) of a bike part
(saddle).

Ideally, dmr would return no suggestion, and wjite would return the
string "white" though I could certainly understand why "write" is
equally good a suggestion. I would be willing to define an add-on
dictionary to ignore certain words, such as brands and abbreviations
which are known to me, such as DMR, so that is possible to handle.

ispell -a yields:

sftriman wrote:

Ever notice that Google does a pretty good job of that? So consider
Net::Google::Spelling:
http://search.cpan.org/~bstilwell/Net-Google-1.0.1/lib/Net/Google/Spelling.pm

sftriman yahoo.com> writes:

You may find this article interesting:
http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

You still need a list of "good" words, of course.

On Apr 3, 6:47 pm, sftriman yahoo.com> wrote:

One thing which might help you rank the strings is the "Levenshtein
distance". This gives you the "difference" between two strings as a
number. I don't know if it is on CPAN but there is a module found
here:

http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/lib/String/Levenshtein/index.html

The documentation is here:

http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/lib/String/Levenshtein/Levenshtein.html

Presumably the string with the smallest Levenshtein distance from the
input string would be the most likely candidate for the spelling
checker, although some very rare words might have small distances.

On Thu, 3 Apr 2008 23:27:56 -0700 (PDT) Ben Bullock gmail.com> wrote: