[Aspell-user] Re: [aspell-devel] Suggestions for correct words, etc.

[Kevin Atkinson]

On Mon, 27 Nov 2006, Devdutt Marathe wrote:

[Originally posted to aspell-devel, but it belongs to aspell-user so I am 
replying to aspell-user]

> I need to receive alternate spellings not only for words not in the
> dictionary, but also for words that are present in the dictionary. This
> would be used, for example, to interface with a search engine and offer
> suggestions for even correctly spelt words based on number of hits received
> for the alternative spellings. What's the easiest way to do this?

If you use the C API you can do this.  The suggest function doesn't care 
if the word is in the dictionary or not.

> I am also thinking of writing some code to set up aspell as an apache httpd
> dynamic shared object which can be accessed over an http api. Is there a
> related effort going on somewhere in the community? In this regard, is it
> safe to use mod_prefork? What about thread-safety? Do I need to
> "synchronize" around calls to the Aspell API? If so, one alternative I can
> think of is to maintain a pool of Aspell objects at the server and use one
> that is free (somewhat like DB connection pooling). Any comments?

This is documented in the manual.

> Lastly, what is the behavior of aspell in the following scenario: I am
> accessing aspell (say correcting a very large file in pipe mode), and while
> I am doing this, I delete the current dictionary, phonetic map, etc., and
> replace them with a new dictionary and phonetic map. Will this cause the
> current call to aspell to crash? When will the new dictionary be loaded?

I assume you mean "change" not "delete" since, in Unix, when you delete a 
file you are really just unlinking it.  Programs which have an open file 
handle to the old file will continue to have access to it until it closes 
the handle.  If you change the read-only dictionary from under it Aspell 
will likely crash or do other strange things since those files are mmaped 
in.  If you change a writable (such as the personal word list) dictionary 
Aspell simply won't use it until the dictionary is reloaded since it is 
read into memory.  You can reload it by calling 
"aspell_speller_save_all_word_lists" since when saving the wordlist Aspell 
also checks for new entries.  There currently isn't a way to just reload 
the writable dictionaries from the C API.