SpellCheck.net is free online spell checking site. Whenever I need to check my spelling I visit this site, so I decided to write a parser for this site. I wrote this parser with C# and wrap it up in DLL file and called it Word.dll. In this article I will show you how to parse an HTML page using regular expression. I will not explain all the source code, source code is available for download. My main purpose of this project is to demonstrate how to parse an html page using regular expressions. Before this project I have never worked with regular expressions seriously, so I decided to use regular expressions. In this project I have learned a lot about C# regular expressions and .NET framework. The difficult part was in this project writing regular expressions pattern. So I referred to different sites, books to get the right pattern.

Here are some useful sites to check out.

http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/sampchap/5861b.asp

http://windows.oreilly.com/news/csharp_0101.html

http://www.regexlib.com/

About Word.dll:

Word.dll has one public class and two public methods

1. Public Class SpellCheck

   Include "using Word.dll" at the top of file for the object reference.

   SpellCheck word = new SpellCheck();

2. Public Method CheckSpelling

   This method will check the word and return true or false. If the word is correct then it will return true otherwise false.

   bool status = false;

   status = word.CheckSpelling("a word");

3. Public Method GetSpellingSuggestions

   This method will return the collection of suggested words.

 foreach(string suggestion in word.GetSpellingSuggestions("a word")) 
 {
 System.Console.WriteLine( suggestion ); 
 }

Parser Technique:

1. Connect to spellcheck.net site and pass the word.

2. Look for the word "correctly." in html file, if found return true

3. else look for the word "misspelled.", if found return false.

    regular expression pattern @"(correctly.)|(misspelled.)"

4. If the word misspelled found in html then look for the word "suggestions:"

   regular expression pattern  @"(suggestions:)"

5. and parse the string between <blockquote>

   regular expression pattern  @"<blockquote>(?:\s*([^<]+) \s*)+ </blockquote>"

6. and finally return the collection of suggested words.

C# code:

Source file is included in zip format for download.

Calling Word.dll wrapper class:

This is how you would call this wrapper class in your application.

using System;
//Word.dll
using Word;
/// 

/// Test Harness for SpellCheck Class
/// 
class TestHarness
{
/// 

/// testing Word Class
/// 
[STAThread]
static void Main(string[] args)
{
SpellCheck word = new SpellCheck();

bool status = false;
string s = "youes";

Console.WriteLine("Checking for word : " + s );

// check to see if the word is not correct  
// return the bool (true|false)
status = word.CheckSpelling(s);

if (status == false)
{
Console.WriteLine("This word is misspelled : " + s);
Console.WriteLine("Here are some suggestions");
Console.WriteLine("-------------------------");

foreach( string suggestion in word.GetSpellingSuggestions(s) ) 
{
System.Console.WriteLine( suggestion ); 
}
}
else if (status == true)
{
Console.WriteLine("This word is correct : " + s );
}

}
}

Compiling:

Run the "compile.bat" file at the DOS prompt, it will create necessary files.

Output:

This is how your screen would look like after you execute TestHarness.exe file.

Download the source code:

Source - 17 kb

Reference: Windows spell checker using SpellCheck.net Parser

About the Author :

Waheed Khan has a Master degree in Computer Science (MS). Currently working with C# and ASP.NET