Python Text Processing - Spell Check

Checking of spelling is a basic requirement in any text processing or analysis. The python package pyspellchecker provides us this feature to find the words that may have been mis-spelled and also suggest the possible corrections.

First, we need to install the required package using the following command in our python environment.

 pip3 install pyspellchecker 

Example - Spell Check

Now we see below how the package is used to point out the wrongly spelled words as well as make some suggestions about possible correct words.

main.py

from spellchecker import SpellChecker

spell = SpellChecker()

# find those words that may be misspelled
misspelled = spell.unknown(['let', 'us', 'wlak','on','the','groun'])

for word in misspelled:
    # Get the one `most likely` answer
    print(spell.correction(word))

    # Get a list of `likely` options
    print(spell.candidates(word))

Output

When we run the above program we get the following output −

group
{'group', 'ground', 'groan', 'grout', 'grown', 'groin'}
walk
{'flak', 'weak', 'walk'}

Example - Case Sensitive Spell Check

If we use Let in place of let then this becomes a case sensitive comparison of the word with the closest matched words in dictionary and the result looks different now.

main.py

from spellchecker import SpellChecker

spell = SpellChecker()

# find those words that may be misspelled
misspelled = spell.unknown(['Let', 'us', 'wlak','on','the','groun'])

for word in misspelled:
    # Get the one `most likely` answer
    print(spell.correction(word))

    # Get a list of `likely` options
    print(spell.candidates(word))

Output

When we run the above program we get the following output −

group
{'groan', 'group', 'groin', 'grown', 'ground', 'grout'}
walk
{'flak', 'weak', 'walk'}