What to expect from symspellpy vs codespell, and a basic usage question.

[kattni]

Hello!

I mentioned this tool to my project lead, and he was initially concerned about my choice to use codespell because it was his understanding that it was aimed at code. I chose it because we are currently using it as part of our workflow, however I glossed over the usage of enchant in addition to codespell.

I understand you're not the dev for either backend, but I figured you might potentially have an answer to this anyway.

I looked into the docs for codespell and symspellpy and I'm not finding an answer to my basic question of: are they good all-around spellcheckers or do they have a more specific use case? Your documentation of the various codespell dictionaries implies it might be, but I'm unclear on what for unambiguous errors means with regards to the clear dictionary. The others are more obvious to me.

In my current build, (which is loaded with problems right now because I haven't gotten to cleaning up the rST-converted Markdown yet) codespell is failing on a translated word only. symspellpy is failing on a bunch of things, some of which are in the known_words file I supplied.

I'm also unclear on whether I can use both backends at the same time. I added symspellpy to my configuration above codespell and, as far as I can tell, it preferred symspellpy. I also noticed that symspellpy seems to have ignored my known_words file - though I'm not sure if this is because I was trying to use both backends at the same time.

Thanks for your time!
Kattni

[pawamoy]

Hello 🙂

From codespell's README:

Fix common misspellings in text files. It’s designed primarily for checking misspelled words in source code (backslash escapes are skipped), but it can be used with other files as well.

SymSpellpy seems like it can be used on any contents too.

I'm unclear on what for unambiguous errors means

Thanks, we could probably add one or two examples to make it more clear.

symspellpy is failing on a bunch of things, some of which are in the known_words file I supplied.

Please open an issue with a reproducible example 😄

I'm also unclear on whether I can use both backends at the same time. I added symspellpy to my configuration above codespell and, as far as I can tell, it preferred symspellpy

If you enable both, both should run independently (you'll get warnings from both). Here's what this plugin does, basically:

for word in words:
    for backend in self.backends.values():
        backend.check(page, word)

If that's not what you're witnessing, please open an issue with a reproducible example 😄