Spell checking in PyQtWebEngine

Question

I am writing a program which is mainly in python but some interactive features are done through a web-app that talks to flask. It would be nice to have the web-app inside the python program so I am looking at using PyQtWebEngine.

This works surprisingly well except that I cannot get spell checking to work. I have run

self.page().profile().setSpellCheckEnabled(True)
self.page().profile().setSpellCheckLanguages({"en-GB"})

from inside my child class of QWebEngineView, and I have checked isSpellCheckEnabled() is True.

I wonder if it cannot find the languages. No qWarning is detected which I would expect if it cannot find the dictionary. As suggested by the non-python example.

I have an en-GB.bdic which I copied from the Chromium hunspell git. I have tried putting the file at:

<directory_my_py_file_is_in>/qtwebengine_dictionaries/en-GB.bdic

When I run

app = QApplication(sys.argv)
print(app.applicationDirPath())

the result is

/usr/bin

so I tried

/usr/bin/qtwebengine_dictionaries/en-GB.bdic

This wouldn't have been OK because I cannot edit this location when the program is pip installed, but it was worth a try.

With the .bdic file in either place I never see any spell check feature.

Has anyone got spellchecking working in PyQtWebEngine? I have not been able to find much in the way of documentation.

Yes the PyQtWebEngine is installed with pip. The web engine is working fine, it is just the spell checker that doesn't. OS is Kubuntu 20.04 — Julian Stirling, May 24 '20 at 16:13

eyllanesc · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-24T17:38:06.077

Assuming that the .bdic are valid then I have established the path of the dictionaries through the environment variable QTWEBENGINE_DICTIONARIES_PATH, for example I have translated the official example into python with the following structure:

├── data
│   ├── icon.svg
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── spellchecker.qrc
│   └── style.css
├── dict
│   ├── de
│   │   ├── de-DE.aff
│   │   ├── de-DE.dic
│   │   └── README.txt
│   └── en
│       ├── en-US.aff
│       ├── en-US.dic
│       └── README.txt
├── main.py
├── spellchecker_rc.py
├── qtwebengine_dictionaries
│   ├── de-DE.bdic
│   └── en-US.bdic
└── README.md

main.py

# ...
CURRENT_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
os.environ["QTWEBENGINE_DICTIONARIES_PATH"] = os.path.join(
    CURRENT_DIR, "qtwebengine_dictionaries"
)
# ...

Note: To get the bdic I have used the qwebengine_convert_dict tool executing:

qwebengine_convert_dict dict/en/en-US.dic qtwebengine_dictionaries/en-US.bdic
qwebengine_convert_dict dict/de/de-DE.dic qtwebengine_dictionaries/de-DE.bdic

_{The complete code is here.}

Your examples repository is fantastic. The environment variable did the trick after I looked at your code and saw some other mistakes I made converting over to PyQT5. Most importantly `self.page().profile().setSpellCheckLanguages({"en-GB"})` should have been self.page().profile().setSpellCheckLanguages(("en-GB",))` — Julian Stirling, May 24 '20 at 19:57

Spell checking in PyQtWebEngine

1 Answers1