The spell checker's got some bugs.

October 5, 2003 4:48 AM

The spell checker's got some bugs.
posted by betaray to Bugs at 4:48 AM (8 comments total)

Nothing big, but just noticing some issues.

It doesn't peserve case on replaced word, e.g. replaced words at the begining of a sentence are lower-cased.

This may or may not be a bug with the spell checker itself, but I'm using Firebird 0.7+ and when try to use the scroll bar on the replacement word selection box it moves on to the next word. I've been unable to repro in IE 6. If no one else can repro I'll assume it's a bug in my browser.

Also, what dictionary file is being used for the spell checker? I've been finding more and more words that aren't in there. I wish I'd kept a list, but for example the latest is contrarian.
posted by betaray at 4:58 AM on October 5, 2003

I just wish it could speak Canadian. It's 'colour', Goddamnit.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:04 AM on October 5, 2003

Obviously the spell checker doesn't know that the word "English" doesn't start with a 'C'.
posted by walrus at 8:15 AM on October 5, 2003

No offense, betaray, but you obviously didn't get the memo. Only posts relating to Tryptophan-5ht are acceptable on MetaTalk now. Please rephrase accordingly. (You could, for example, use the spell-checker's replacement for Tryptophan-5ht as a hook.)
posted by languagehat at 9:53 AM on October 5, 2003

Tryptophan-5ht => cryptogram
posted by ~rschram at 12:21 PM on October 5, 2003

languagehat: to make it more relevant, and wielding my flame-resistant tin-foil umbrella, I will take the risk of pointing out that the spell checker happily doesn't appear to know that word either.
posted by walrus at 12:27 PM on October 5, 2003

Obviously, the spell-checker is using the American language rather than English, which explains why it insists that so many words are spelled incorrectly when they are not. Apart from that obvious bug which all English-speaking people have noticed and learned to live with, the vocabulary of the spell-checker does seem somewhat limited.
posted by dg at 3:55 PM on October 5, 2003

This is related, so I won't start another thread, but there seems to be some trouble all round parsing HTML entities. Put this into a comment then try to spell check it:

<blah>

The spell checker gets very confused.

Also if you try to preview a post with & that it gets replaced with just an &. OK, I'll try to stop breaking things now :)
posted by betaray at 3:57 PM on October 5, 2003