Google Toolbar Spell Check API
July 19, 2005I saw in this post that the Google toolbar could be extracted and looked at. So, I spend an afternoon reverse engineering the spell checker api. The api ends up to be very easy to use. Checking is done with an HTTP post to https://www.google.com/tbproxy/spell?lang=en&hl=en.
The xml structure looks like this…
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<spellrequest textalreadyclipped="0" ignoredups="0" ignoredigits="1" ignoreallcaps="1">
<text>Ths is a tst</text>
</spellrequest>
The response look like …
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<spellresult error="0" clipped="0" charschecked="12">
<c o="0" l="3" s="1">This Th's Thus Th HS</c>
<c o="9" l="3" s="1">test tat ST St st</c>
</spellresult>
| Tag | Description |
| o | The offset from the start of the text of the word |
| l | Length of misspelled word |
| s | Confidence of the suggestion |
| text | Tab delimited list of suggestions |
I created a complete C# GoogleSpell library as a demo. The library can be download at http://www.loresoft.com/files/uploads/GoogleSpell.zip
Here is an example on how to use GoogleSpell …
string text = "ths is a tst";
SpellRequest request = new SpellRequest(text);
SpellResult result = SpellCheck.Check(request);
foreach (SpellCorrection correction in result.Corrections)
{
Console.WriteLine("Misspelled: {0} ({1}:{2})",
text.Substring(correction.Offset, correction.Length),
correction.Offset, correction.Length);
foreach(string suggestion in correction.Suggestions)
{
Console.WriteLine(" {0}", suggestion);
}
}
I plan to develop an ajax web client for the google spell api. This will be really sweet as it won’t require anything to be installed on the sever other then a js file. I’ll post again when I have the web client complete.