Correct commonly misspelled English words... quickly.

install with go get -u github.com/client9/misspell/cmd/misspell

$ misspell all.html your.txt important.md files.go
your.txt:42:10 found "langauge" a misspelling of "language"

# ^ file, line, column

You'll need golang 1.5 or newer installed to compile it. But after that it's a standalone binary.

If people want pre-compiled binaries, file a ticket please.

FAQ

• Automatic Corrections
• Converting UK spellings to US
• Using pipes and stdin
• Golang special support
• gometalinter support
• Changing output format
• Checking a folder recursively
• Performance
• Known Issues
• Debugging
• False Negatives and missing words
• Origin of Word Lists
• Software License
• Problem statement
• Other spelling correctors
• Other ideas

How can I make the corrections automatically?

Just add the -w flag!

$ misspell -w all.html your.txt important.md files.go
your.txt:9:21:corrected "langauge" to "language"

# ^booyah

How do I convert British spellings to American (or vice-versa)?

Add the -locale US flag!

$ misspell -locale US important.txt
important.txt:10:20 found "colour" a misspelling of "color"

Add the -locale UK flag!

$ echo "My favorite color is blue" | misspell -locale UK
stdin:1:3:found "favorite color" a misspelling of "favourite colour"

Help is appreciated as I'm neither British nor an expert in the English language.

How do you check an entire folder recursively?

You can run misspell recursively using the following shell tricks:

misspell directory/**/*

or

find . -name '*' | xargs misspell

Can I use pipes or stdin for input?

Yes!

Print messages to stderr only:

$ echo "zeebra" | misspell
stdin:1:0:found "zeebra" a misspelling of "zebra"

Print messages to stderr, and corrected text to stdout:

$ echo "zeebra" | misspell -w
stdin:1:0:corrected "zeebra" to "zebra"
zebra

Only print the corrected text to stdout:

$ echo "zeebra" | misspell -w -q
zebra

Are there special rules for golang source files?

Yes! If the file ends in .go, then misspell will only check spelling in comments.

If you want to force a file to be checked as a golang source, use -source=go on the command line. Conversely, you can check a golang source as if it were pure text by using -source=text. You might want to do this since many variable names have misspellings in them!

Can I check only-comments in other other programming languages?

I'm told the using -source=go works well for ruby, javascript, java, c and c++.

It doesn't work well for python and bash.

Does this work with gometalinter?

gometalinter runs multiple golang linters. Starting on 2016-06-12 gometalinter supports misspell natively but it is disabled by default.

# update your copy of gometalinter
go get -u github.com/alecthomas/gometalinter

# install updates and misspell
gometalinter --install --update

To use, just enable misspell

gometalinter --enable misspell ./...

Note that gometalinter only checks golang files, and uses the default options of misspell

You may wish to run this on your plaintext (.txt) and/or markdown files too.

How can I change the output format?

Using the -f template flag you can pass in a golang text template to format the output.

The built-in template uses everything, including the js function to escape the original text.

{{ .Filename }}:{{ .Line }}:{{ .Column }}:corrected "{{ js .Original }}" to "{{ js .Corrected }}"

To just print probable misspellings:

-f '{{ .Original }}'

What problem does this solve?

This corrects commonly misspelled English words in computer source code, and other text-based formats (.txt, .md, etc).

It is designed to run quickly so it can be used as a pre-commit hook with minimal burden on the developer.

It does not work with binary formats (e.g. Word, etc).

It is not a complete spell-checking program nor a grammar checker.

What are other misspelling correctors and what's wrong with them?

Some other misspelling correctors:

• https://github.com/vlajos/misspell_fixer
• https://github.com/lyda/misspell-check
• https://github.com/lucasdemarchi

They all work but had problems that prevented me from using them at scale:

• slow, all of the above check one misspelling at a time (i.e. linear) using regexps
• not MIT/Apache2 licensed (or equivalent)
• have dependencies that don't work for me (python3, bash, linux sed, etc)
• don't understand American vs. British English and sometimes makes unwelcome "corrections"

That said, they might be perfect for you and many have more features than this project!

How fast is it?

Misspell is Easily 100x to 1000x faster than other spelling correctors. You should be able to check and correct 1000 files in under 250ms.

This uses the mighty power of golang's strings.Replacer which is a implementation or variation of the Aho–Corasick algorithm. This makes multiple substring matches simultaneously

In addition this uses multiple CPU cores to work on multiple files.

What problems does it have?

Unlike the other projects, this doesn't know what a "word" is. There may be more false positives and false negatives due to this. On the other hand, it sometimes catches things others don't.

Either way, please file bugs and we'll fix them!

Since it operates in parallel to make corrections, it can be non-obvious to determine exactly what word was corrected.

It's making mistakes. How can I debug?

Run using -debug flag on the file you want. It should then print what word it is trying to correct. Then file a bug describing the problem. Thanks!

Why is it making mistakes or missing items in golang files?

The matching function is case-sensitive, so variable names that are multiple worlds either in all-upper or all-lower case sometimes can cause false positives. For instance a variable named bodyreader could trigger a false positive since yrea is in the middle that could be corrected to year. Other problems happen if the variable name uses a English contraction that should use an apostrophe. The best way of fixing this is to use the Effective Go naming conventions and use camelCase for variable names. You can check your code using golint

What license is this?

MIT

Where do the word lists come from?

It started with a word list from Wikipedia. Unfortunately, this list had to be highly edited as many of the words are obsolete or based from mistakes on mechanical typewriters (I'm guessing).

Additional words were added based on actually mistakes seen in the wild (meaning self-generated).

Variations of UK and US spellings are based on many sources including:

• http://www.tysto.com/uk-us-spelling-list.html (with heavy editing, many are incorrect)
• http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/american-and-british-spelling-american (excellent site but incomplete)
• Diffing US and UK scowl dictionaries

American English is more accepting of spelling variations than is British English, so "what is American or not" is subject to opinion. Corrections and help welcome.

### What are some other enhancements that could be done?

Here's some ideas for enhancements:

Capitalization of proper nouns could be done (e.g. weekday and month names, country names, language names)

Opinionated US spellings US English has a number of words with alternate spellings. Think adviser vs. advisor. While "advisor" is not wrong, the opinionated US locale would correct "advisor" to "adviser".

Versioning Some type of versioning is needed so reporting mistakes and errors is easier.

Feedback Mistakes would be sent to some server for agregation and feedback review.