Hunspell (Open Office’s Spell Checker) wrapped for .Net = NHunspell – Your LGPL spell checker, hyphenation library for .Net

CodeProject - NHunspell - Hunspell for the .NET plattform

“…

I was looking for a good spell checker and hyphenation library for .NET, and I found the free (LGPL licensed) Hunspell spell checker and Hyphen libraries used in OpenOffice. Hunspell wasn't available for the .NET platform. So, I decided to write a wrapper/port. It is quite nice that a lot of the OpenOffice dictionaries are LGPL licensed too and can be used in proprietary applications.

Interop code to the native Hunspell functions

I used Managed C++ to write the wrapper/port, because I could use the original source code of Hunspell and Hyphen. It was quite nice to write the interop code between managed classes and the unmanaged Hunspell and Hyphen libraries. The original source code is almost unchanged, so that new versions of Hunspell or Hyphen can be easily adopted. Hunspell and Hyphen use unmanaged memory functions, so I had to implement the IDisposable interface and used this pattern to free unmanaged memory early.

Because Hunspell uses UTF8 coding, I had to provide conversion functions from/to UTF8:

…

NHunspell spell checking and hyphenation sample

This is a short demo of how to use NHunspell for spell checking, suggestions, and hyphenation:

…

using (Hunspell hunspell = new Hunspell("en_us.aff", "en_us.dic"))
{
    Console.WriteLine("Check if the word 'Recommendation' is spelled correct");
    bool correct = hunspell.Spell("Recommendation");
    Console.WriteLine("Recommendation is spelled " +
              (correct ? "correct" : "not correct"));

    Console.WriteLine("");
    Console.WriteLine("Make suggestions for the word 'Recommendatio'");
    List<string> suggestions = hunspell.Suggest("Recommendatio");
    Console.WriteLine("There are " + suggestions.Count.ToString() +
                      " suggestions" );
    foreach (string suggestion in suggestions)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Suggestion is: " + suggestion );
    }
}

…”

I don’t remember the exact project, but I remember looking for a good, free, easy to deploy spell checker for .Net and I think I’ve now just found it. :)