Re: [aspell-devel] Newbie Question re: HTTP access to Aspell

[Brett Bonfield]

Someone pointed out that I didn't have my name in the From: header, and 
I wanted to thank that person for pointing this out. People who know me 
are used to the "A Boy Called 3" stuff, but it was inappropriate for 
this list. Apologies to anyone who thought the list had been attacked by 
a spammer.

I've continued working at the problem of gathering and parsing an Aspell 
response from the form at aspell.net/suggest/ via HTPP, but I'm still 
having a difficult time figuring out if my issue is with Aspell, PHP, 
HTTP, shell syntax, or some combination of the above.

Here's my understanding of the situation:

Chris Snyder's PHP script calls Aspell as a shell exec to check a whole 
block of text:
http://chxo.com/scripts/spellcheck.php?showsource=1#source

( BTW, the Pages plugin based on Chris Snyder's script, Spell Check 1.0, 
can be found here: http://www.neatnik.net/pages/Download.html )

His script assumes Aspell is installed locally. The Pages implementation 
will make that its first assumption, but rather than return an error if 
Aspell isn't installed locally, as currently happens, I want it to 
attempt to connect to aspell.net/suggest/ via HTTP. I see a few 
possibilities:

curl ( http://curl.haxx.se/ - though curl isn't a PHP requirement, so 
this may not be an ideal option )

Snoopy ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/snoopy/ - though Snoopy may be 
overkill, given what appears to be a relatively simple request )

HTTPClient by Simon Willison ( http://scripts.incutio.com/httpclient/ - 
though even HTTPClient may be more robust than is needed )

Also, all of these are screen scraping programs and so I suspect they 
may make less efficient use of resources than some other option. But, as 
I've said and probably made terribly clear, I'm more than a bit out of 
my depth. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Brett Bonfield