Re: [Aspell-user] aspell 0.60.5 / dansk dictionary: returning lines starting with question mark characte

[Kevin Atkinson]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2007, Daniel Sippel wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I have a problem concerning aspell 0.60.5 in combinition with dansk 
> dictionary aspell-da-0.50.1-0.tar.bz2
>
>
> Aspell gives two lines beginning with a "question mark" ? character as 
> result. The programm which is trying to interpret the result fails with 
> exception. I read the aspell developers documentation and got to know, 
> that the result lines should start with *, & or #.

I'm sorry.  The documentation is out of date.  The behavior of "aspell -a" 
tried to match Ispell as close as possible and that the "?" comes from 
Ispell.  From the Ispell documentation:

...

If there are no near misses at all, the line format is the same, except 
that the '&' is replaced by '?' (and the near-miss count is always zero). 
The suggested derivations following the near misses are in the form:

       [prefix+] root [-prefix] [-suffix] [+suffix]

(e.g., "re+fry-y+ies" to get "refries") where each optional pfx and sfx is 
a string.  Also, each near miss or guess is capitalized the same as the 
input word unless such capitalization is illegal; in the latter case each 
near miss is capitalized correctly according to the dictionary. Finally, 
if the word does not appear in the dictionary, and there are no near 
misses, then the line contains a '#', a space, the misspelled word, a 
space, and the character offset from the beginning of the line. ...