Hi Sam,
On 11 Jan 2007, at 13:31, Sam Halliday wrote:
I see what your script is doing there and it would be sensible but for the fact that I would require British (not American) English plus my own personal additions to the dictionary.
I could get around the British restraint by using a British file from somewhere (possibly aspell), and my personal additions as located in "Library/Spelling/en_GB" (but uses some odd characters and terminators, so regex definitely needed there).
OK. I can see the problem with the bunch of English varieties.
Perhaps you might want to generalise your script to include the user additions?
What do you mean with to 'generalise'?
The 'only' thing to do is to create your own dict file. The dict file is nothing else than a list of words, one word one line.
If you need a British English wordlist you can download such, e.g., via http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/ (here one can find also other languages), look for 'wbritish-huge', download it, use the Terminal command 'dpkg-deb -x' to extract the package. After that you have a British wordlist of roughly 57000 words. Add your own additions to that file and replace '/usr/share/dict/webs2' with the location of your own file in the Ruby script. Furthermore you can merge this Debian British wordlist with Debian's wamerican-huge list and with the ca. 250000 Webster words, remove the duplicates, and at the end you have a British/American/Webster wordlist of ca. 280.000 words.
That means in other words, my approach is based only on a wordlist written as a plain text file!
Cheers,
Hans