Re: How to get Aspell to not suggest profanities

It seems to me that this issue could be most directly addressed at the 
dictionary level.  Removing the profanities from your chosen Aspell 
dictionary would prevent those words from being suggested.  This would 
be far more reliable than trying to guess all the possible words that 
might seem, to Aspell, similar enough to trigger the profanity 
suggestion.

By coincidence, Kevin Atkinson posted this response today:

> -- Is there a way to retrieve a plaintext, LF-delimited list of words 
from a
> .rws Aspell dictionary? I've seen information on how to create .rws
> dictionaries from lists of words, but not vice versa.

aspell dump master


I'm thinking that you could "dump" your dictionary word list, edit it 
as desired, re-encode it and solve your problem.  Whether the license 
for the dictionary that you use would permit you to remove words is 
another question.  I would hope so.

Good luck,

Derek Roff


--On Sunday, July 8, 2007 12:00 PM -0400 [email protected] 
wrote:

> Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2007 10:47:26 +1200
> From: "Skalk van der Merwe" <[email protected]>
> Subject: [Aspell-user] How to get Aspell to not suggest profanities
> To: <[email protected]>
>
> Dear All
>
> Here at VUW we make use of the Aspell software to provide spelling
> corrections / suggestions for the Library Catalogue.
> http://victoria.lconz.ac.nz/
>
> Sometime when users search for a legitimate word Aspell would suggest
> a profanity.
> For example Cnut (England's Viking king) ; 'hispan? cuentes' and
> 'FCUK' all produced some profanities in our implementation of Aspell.
>
> In the past I just added the word that produced the profanity to
> custom dictionary. Aspell would of course now see these words as
> legitimate and not suggest a profanity. To do this effectively I need
> to know what words are likely to produce profanities, which in the
> long run is not a good proposition.
> So, is there a switch that one could use to turn of the profanities?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Skalk
>
> Skalk van der Merwe
> Systems Support Librarian
> Victoria University of Wellington
> www.victoria.ac.nz/library



Derek Roff
Language Learning Center
Ortega Hall 129, MSC03-2100
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001
505/277-7368, fax 505/277-3885
Internet: [email protected]