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Victor Ribeiro
Victor Ribeiro

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I made a terrible spell checker in Go

goSpellcheck

A terrbile spell checker written in Go.

About

Since I've never really done anything in Go, I’ve decided to create a simple spell check. So I went to (https://github.com/dwyl/english-words/)[https://github.com/dwyl/english-words/] and Got a bunch of words as a dictionary (words.txt).

After that I wrote some Go code to check if a given word was present in the dictionary, and if it’s not, gather the 3 more similar words and return as suggestions. The first time I wrote a similar code, in python, I used the euclidean distance and edit distance. This time around, however, I only check letter for letter and giver a plus 1 if they are different.

After that, I went to (Lists of common misspellings/For machines)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lists_of_common_misspellings/For_machines] and tested my spell check against it with a little bash script I wrote.

It was a nice little project I did just so I don't get too rust while I'm on college vacation.

Hot to use

Just call the the goSpellcheck.go file passing a word as parameter.

go run goSpellcheck.go word

Score

The spell checker got 1185 from 4278 words, around 27,7%.

You can take a look at the code here

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