How to define aspell word delimiters?

Question

Aspell considers words with underscores or dashes as two, e.g. cloud-based is spell checked as "cloud" and "based". Is there any way to specify the word delimiters so as to exclude dash and underscore?

aren't you looking for [this](http://aspell.net/man-html/Words-With-Symbols-in-Them.html#Words-With-Symbols-in-Them)? — Qnan, Jun 29 '12 at 14:06
@Mikhail Something like that. Though that article offers no explanation on how to customize which characters are word boundaries and which are not. I.e., I want aspell to think that cloud-based is one word, and if I misspell is, for example "cluod-based", I want aspell to return the whole word, not just "cluod". Does that make sense? — mart1n, Jun 29 '12 at 14:21
I take it you wouldn't like to treat all dashes as 'letters', right? — Qnan, Jun 29 '12 at 15:48
@MikhailKozhevnikov Umm, if you consider dashes letters, is the word "and-" misspelled? — mart1n, Jul 05 '12 at 14:48

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 09 '18 at 11:20

2

If I understand the question correctly, Aspell cannot do exactly what you want (up to my knowledge). This has to do with conditional compound word treatment, which is on the Aspells TODO list.

On the same list it is mentioned that Hunspell does a better job with compound words, so it might be a viable alternative if you're not bound to Aspell. OpenOffice uses Hunspell for spellchecking, so it is easy to find out whether it fits your requirements. It does, at least, work for the "cloud-based" example, and does NOT consider all hyphenated words unconditional compounds, i.e. "based-cloud" would not be considered a spelling error.

edited Jun 09 '18 at 11:20

Scott C Wilson

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answered Jul 05 '12 at 15:33

Qnan

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Thanks for your answer. Maybe I'll take a look at hunspell then. – mart1n Jul 09 '12 at 09:22
Note that `hunspell` only handles hyphenations when each of the underlying elements is itself a word. So "cloud-based" works, but "Add-Ons" does not. – Scott C Wilson Jun 09 '18 at 17:21

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:31

Aspell is unable to do what you want it to do at this point. The interface it uses for handling word with symbols in them is not sophisticated enough to handle such a case at this time. More information on this is listed here.

Sorry that this cannot be solved up to this point, unless you want to implement your own interface. I would recommend using Hunspell as Mikhail suggested.

How to define aspell word delimiters?

2 Answers2