Spellchecking in PHP

Question

I am looking to possibly add in some sort of spellchecking/correction in PHP, is there anything that is recommended?

Is this a slow process? It would be for user submitted blog posts and forum post, possibly even just be used in an admin area if performance is not good.

Answer 1

There's the Pspell libraries in PHP, but also don't forget that most modern browsers these days come with a built-in spell checker which would be:

1. A lot more intuitive to the user (works just like Word and every other desktop app)
2. Able to be extended with the user adding words to their own dictionaries
3. A heck of a lot less work for you.

The performance I don't think would be an issue, it's just that you'd have to make your own interface for getting the user to select the correct spelling for every misspelt word, etc.

Answer 2

tinyMCE has a spellchecker plugin that works with Google's free spellchecking service. Fairly easy to setup and doesn't have any server-side dependencies other than the openssl extension for PHP and possibly curl. I prefer this because it doesn't involving installing any other server-side libraries like Pspell.

Check out the plugin in action on the examples and tinyMCE download page for a copy of the spellchecker plugin. (I'm not sure if the spellcheck on the example page is using Google or a server-side library like pspell, but the behavior is identical).