Hunspell with PHP on Windows – Part 1

Ok so I hear you saying, how the hell can I use Hunspell and PHP with Windows, Now the way I am going to show you isn’t the only way but is a much simpler way without compiling and using binaries.

What is Hunspell?

Well I can re-write what’s already written, however if you wish to find out, please check the link below

https://hunspell.github.io/

Long story cut short, Hunspell is a tool that you can use to validate your text against a given dictionary, get options for correct spellings for a wrongly spelt words.

What to do next on Windows 8/10?

First thing first you have to get the executables, I’ve got hunspell-1.3.2-3-w32-bin.zip, download and extract it to say c:\Hunspell so path to bin folder will look like c:\Hunspell\bin 

This is where you will find hunspell.exe

Great so far so good, now let’s add our bin folder to our Environment PATH,

Setting Environment variable PATH

Step 1

Goto Control Panel –> System –> Advanced system settings –> “Advanced” tab –> “Environment Variables”

Step 2

Under “System variables” window select “Path” and click “Edit” button

Step 3

A window “Edit System Variable” will pop up showing the current value of “Path”. At the end of that string add ;c:\Hunspell\bin

Step 4

Click Ok buttons to exit current open pop up windows

We are pretty much set, now open your command prompt and type

You will see something like this

Now try typing

baddd and press enter

You will see something like this

Above line is just options of matching words to correct the misspelled word. This step validates that our installation works ok. However you may see error something like this

This means that dictionary definitions are missing, how to recover from this situation

First thing to do is to use hunspell command with -D flag

This will give you list of paths where Hunspell search for dictionaries, First one for me is listed as c:\Hunspell\share\hunspell

Downloading dictionaries

You have to search for Word list for your own language, however if you are keen to know a couple of resources, you can use something like http://wordlist.aspell.net/ etc Once downloaded, copy and paster .aff and .dic file in the default search folder and you are all set.

By this time I hope that hanspell installation is working so we take this to next level.

In part 2 of this post, I will show you how you can utilize PHP to validate your text for spelling mistakes.

I will see you in next post, stay tuned.