Source code friendly spell check?

[Gary Beene]

It's a painful process to use any of my spell check tools on my source code documentation.

The IDE/compiler checks my code, so what I'm trying to catch is comments in the code, plus text in the documentation surrounding the source code.

Do anyone use a spell checker that handles this situation well?

[Scott Slater]

You could write a fast and dirty utility to extract only the comments and put them in a text file. Then just spell check the text file.

[Gary Beene]

Hi Scott,

Yep, that would work, although I'd have to manual track the changes I made and transfer them to the original file (or make the changes there).

But I also have content in the documentation which is not commented source code, but is discussion about the code, so in that case I need another solution.

[Michael Mattias]

Use the COM interface to MS Word, loading your source file? You can call a spell checker method, and react to changes with a replace method.

(Hell, I didn't say I could DO it, but it sounds reasonable).

[Christopher Carroll]

Yep, that would work, although I'd have to manual track the changes I made and transfer them to the original file (or make the changes there).

Why? Using Scott's idea, you would know where the comments come from in the source, so expand the program to put them back when you have run the spell-checker. That would be great utility.

[Cliff Nichols]

Gary, Have you given any of these a shot? I did a search for "Find Replace SpellCheck" and the following came up in the Source Code Forum

KeyNote Plugin - Tony Burcham
More SpellCheck COM code - Michael Vickery
Word COM Spell and Thesaurus - Michael Vickery
Word COM Spell Check - Michael Vickery

Not many but there are a few out there. I have not tested these but if they are in the Source Code forum they most likely work.

[Michael Mattias]

> Not many but there are a few out there.... in the Source Code forum

There is a LOT of stuff in the Source Code Forum. The only real frustration is, not all the threads have good 'keywords' in their titles, or something in the title is misspelled.

And if you don't know the 'magic' words which appear in the code, even the full text search (vs 'Thread Title' search) won't help.

While you cannot edit the subject lines, now you CAN add tags at any time. Maybe when you find something after a tough search for lack of keywords you could take the couple of minutes to add tags to the thread so it will be easier for the next person to find it.

There's also some Gold in Them Thar 'Not the Source Code' Forums. I say if it's worth posting a complete, compilable program, it's worth posting in the Source Code Forum.

YMMV.

MCM

[Terry Webb]

It's a painful process to use any of my spell check tools on my source code documentation.

The IDE/compiler checks my code, so what I'm trying to catch is comments in the code, plus text in the documentation surrounding the source code.

Do anyone use a spell checker that handles this situation well?

I use UltraEdit, which includes GNU Aspell. As you spell check, you can simply choose to add the PowerBasic commands, keywords, equates, variables, macros, and procedures to your personal dictionary, thereby building a custom PB specific dictionary.

Also, if you use all uppercase for your PowerBasic commands, keywords, etc. you can set the spellchecker to ignore all uppercase words.

I think that is probably as good as you could do.

HTH

[Dave Biggs]

Apart from all sorts of other benefits to using a third party editor (clip text,
code folding, user defined tools and hot keys etc) Some have a built-in spell checker.

These spell check options are available in EditPlus http://www.editplus.com/

Options:
Ignore words with numbers
Ignore URLs and E-mail addresses
Ignore all-caps words
Ignore mixed case
Skip HTML tags
Check the Latin alphabet only

Dictionary:
US English. UK English

Combined with a user dictionary:
Plain text file that has ".USD" extension.
You can add items into this file by Add or Add Uncap
command in the Spell Checker dialog box or by manually editing the file.