pyenchant 3.0.0rc2

Python bindings for the Enchant spellchecking system

Status: maintenance transfer

Maintenance of this project is getting transferred from Ryan Kelly to me, Dimitri Merejkowsky. Expect a few bumps down the road while issues are sorted out.

A new release is being worked on, see the “next release” milestone for more details.

pyenchant: Python bindings for the Enchant spellchecker

This package provides a set of Python language bindings for the Enchant spellchecking library. For more information, visit the project website:

http://pyenchant.github.io/pyenchant/

What is Enchant?

Enchant is used to check the spelling of words and suggest corrections for words that are miss-spelled. It can use many popular spellchecking packages to perform this task, including ispell, aspell and MySpell. It is quite flexible at handling multiple dictionaries and multiple languages.

More information is available on the Enchant website:

http://www.abisource.com/enchant/

How do I use it?

For Windows and OSX users, install the pre-built binary packages using pip:

pip install pyenchant

These packages bundle a pre-built copy of the underlying enchant library. Users on other platforms will need to install “enchant” using their system package manager.

Once the software is installed, python’s on-line help facilities can get you started. Launch python and issue the following commands:

>>> import enchant
>>> help(enchant)

Who is responsible for all this?

The credit for Enchant itself goes to Dom Lachowicz. Find out more details on the Enchant website listed above. Full marks to Dom for producing such a high-quality library.

The glue to pull Enchant into Python via ctypes was written by Ryan Kelly. He needed a decent spellchecker for another project he was working on, and all the solutions turned up by Google were either extremely non-portable (e.g. opening a pipe to ispell) or had completely disappeared from the web (what happened to SnakeSpell?) It was also a great excuse to teach himself about SWIG, ctypes, and even a little bit of the Python/C API.

Finally, after Ryan stepped down from the project, Dimitri Merejkowsky became the new maintainer.