About

Sibel is a Python spellchecker with the powerful Hunspell as the back-end. Specifically, the following methods are available:

• spell(): check if a word is spelled correctly.
• suggest(): get a list of suggestions for a word.
• stem(): get the stems of a word.
• analyse(): get the morphological analysis of a word.

Apart from these methods, Sibel also provides an additional one, orthographic_forms(), which, given an input in ASCII, returns a list of all possible orthographic forms of the input in Unicode, that is, with diacritics added, and constituent letters combined into proper ligatures.

Comparison with PyHunspell

• Sibel is not wedded to Hunspell. It might switch to other back-ends.
• PyHunspell is no longer actively maintained, and uses deprecated APIs.
• Sibel's methods return the natural types, instead of raw bytes.
• Sibel releases the GIL when appropriate.
• Sibel has an additional method, which requires libicu.
• Sibel does not expose all APIs of Hunspell.

Installation

pip install sibel

On devices with limited memory, the compilation might fail due to the very large map defined in substitutions.cc. If this happens, the only way to use Sibel is manual compilation. First comment out the languages you don't use (by prepending // to irrelevant lines), then run the following:

python setup.py build
python setup.py install

Usage

>>> import sibel
>>> speller = sibel.Speller('/usr/share/hunspell', 'de_DE')
>>> speller.orthographic_forms('Massen')
['Massen', 'Maßen']
>>> speller = sibel.Speller('/usr/share/hunspell', 'en_GB')
>>> speller.spell('analyze')
False
>>> speller.suggest('analyze')
['analyse', 'analyte']
>>> speller.stem('archer')
['arch']
>>> speller.orthographic_forms('fiance')
['fiancé', 'fiance']