Using Hunspell dictionaries
 

I am trying to use the Hunspell dictionary that comes with Sigil to detect hyphenated words that are not always hyphenated.

For example, good-bye, is normally hyphenated but failed-and is not normally hyphenated unless it appears in a phrase such as he failed-and failed dismally.

However, the Hunspell dictionary passes both of these examples as correct. Is there a way to enable the Huunspell dictionary to identify good-bye as normally hyphenated and failed-and as not normally hyphenated?

I need to be able to distinguish between these types of hyphenated words so that I can write code for my plugin at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=264378 to change the short hyphen to a long hyphen where appropriate. For example, I want to change the short hyphen in:

he failed-and failed dismally to a long hyphen (mdash) in:

he failed–and failed dismally.

AFAIK, no. There is no real way to separate "good-bye" and "failed-and" as being different in the eyes of the spell-checker. You could of course build a wordlist of commonly hyphenated words and check it to see if it makes this common list, but I really can't say that one of those is incorrectly spelled and therefore a mistake in spelling.

Sorry

"good-bye" is an actual word. "failed-and" is two words improperly hyphenated.

But spellcheckers don't really seem to consider that one word, for some reason. I guess they think all dashes are the same -- hyphens, en dashes, em dashes, what's the big deal? :rolleyes: So I'm not really sure what Sigil is supposed to do about that.
You'll see the same problem in calibre, or for that matter the Firefox/Chrome edit box. ;)

@CalibUser - This is what I do - in Spellcheck; check the Show all words box at the bottom of the list, then enter a hyphen into the Filter box at the top of the list. Eyeball the list looking for anomalous entries. such as failed-and.

I also have a saved search to find non-breaking hyphens, which maybe useful in 'identifiers', such as telephone or part numbers etc, but, IMO at least, they're best avoided elsewhere.

BR

Thank you for all your replies.

Interesting that spellcheckers don't really seem to consider "failed-and" as a hyphenated word.

As I needed my plugin to replace short hyphens by long hyphens for these types of words, I will follow the suggestion made by KevinH and use the method used by BetterRed to compile a list of words that need to have the long-hyphen changed.