There are two main ways to use aspell from within your application.
Through the Pspell API or though a pipe. The Aspell API can be used
directly but that is not recommended as the actual Aspell API is constantly
changing.
Read-only Aspell methods and functions should be thread safe as long
as exceptions, new, delete, delete[], and STL allocators are thread
safe. To the best of my knowledge gcc and egcs meet these requirements.
It is up to the programmer to make sure multiple threads do not do
thing such as change the dictionaries and add or delete items from
the personal or session dictionaries.
6.2 Through A Pipe
When given the pipe or -a command aspell goes into
a pipe mode that is compatible with ``ispell -a''. Aspell also
defines its own set of extensions to ispell pipe mode.
6.2.1 Format of the Data Stream
In this mode, Aspell prints a one-line version identification message,
and then begins reading lines of input. For each input line, a single
line is written to the standard output for each word checked for spelling
on the line. If the word was found in the main dictionary, or your
personal dictionary, then the line contains only a '*'.
If the word is not in the dictionary, but there are suggestions, then
the line contains an '&', a space, the misspelled word, a space,
the number of near misses, the number of characters between the beginning
of the line and the beginning of the misspelled word, a colon, another
space, and a list of the suggestions separated by commas and spaces.
Finally, if the word does not appear in the dictionary, and there
are no suggestions, then the line contains a '#', a space, the misspelled
word, a space, and the character offset from the beginning of the
line. Each sentence of text input is terminated with an additional
blank line, indicating that ispell has completed processing the input
line.
When in the -a mode, Aspell will also accept lines of single words
prefixed with any of '*', '&', '@', '+', '-', '~',
'#', '!', '%', or '^'. A line starting with '*'
tells ispell to insert the word into the user's dictionary. A line
starting with '&' tells ispell to insert an all-lowercase version
of the word into the user's dictionary. A line starting with '@' causes
ispell to accept this word in the future. A line starting with '+',
followed immediately by a valid mode will cause aspell to parse future
input according the syntax of that formatter. A line consisting solely
of a '+' will place ispell in TEX/LATEX mode (similar to the
-t option) and '-' returns aspell to its default mode (but these commands
are obsolete). A line '~', is ignored for ispell compatibility.
A line prefixed with '#' will cause the personal dictionaries to
be saved. A line prefixed with '!' will turn on terse mode (see below),
and a line prefixed with '%' will return ispell to normal (non-terse)
mode. Any input following the prefix characters '+', '-', '#', '!',
'~', or '%' is ignored, as is any input following.
To allow spell-checking of lines beginning with these characters,
a line starting with '^' has that character removed
before it is passed to the spell-checking code. It is recommended
that programmatic interfaces prefix every data line with an uparrow
to protect themselves against future changes in Aspell.
To summarize these:
*«word»
Add a word to the
personal dictionary
&«word»
Insert the all-lowercase
version of the word in the personal dictionary
@«word»
Accept the word,
but leave it out of the dictionary
#
Save the current personal dictionary
~
Ignored for ispell compatibility.
+
Enter TEX mode.
+«mode»
Enter the mode specified
by «mode».
-
Enter the default mode.
!
Enter terse mode
%
Exit terse mode
^
Spell-check the rest of the line
In terse mode, Aspell will not print lines beginning with '*', which
indicate correct words. This significantly improves running speed
when the driving program is going to ignore correct words anyway.
In addition to the above commands which are designed for Ispell compatibility
Aspell also supports its own extension. All Aspell extensions follow
the following format.
$$«command» [data]
Where data may or may not be required depending on the particular
command. Aspell currently supports the following command.
cs «option»,«value»
Change
a configuration option.
cr «option»
Prints the value
of a configuration option.
s «word1»,«word2»
Returns
the score of the two words based roughly on how aspell would score
them.
Sw «word»
Returns the soundlike
equivalent of the word.
Sl «word»
Returns a list
of words that have the same soundlike equivalent.
Pw «word»
Returns the phoneme
equivalent of the word.
pp
Returns a list of all words in the current personal wordlist.
ps
Returns a list of all words in the current session dictionary.
l
Returns the current language name.
ra «mis»,«cor»
Add
the word pair to the replacement dictionary for latter use. Returns
nothing.
Anything returned is returned on its own line line. All lists returned
have the following format
«num of items»: «item1»,
«item2», «etc»
(Part of the preceding section was directly copied out of the
Ispell manual)
6.3 Notes of Storing Replacement Pairs
As of version .27 of Aspell storing replacements pairs has a memory.
Which means if you first store the replacement pair:
sicolagest -> psycolagest
then store the replacement pair
psycolagest -> psychologist
The replacement pair
sicolagest -> psychologist
will also get stored so that you don't have to worry about it.