Tkinter: Spell checker

Question

I am trying to put together a simple text box in tkniter with a spell check integrated. I have looked at pyenchant and I am not sure how to integrate it into the tkinter text box, or if I should look at an entirely different spell checker.

import enchant
import tkinter as tk
from enchant.tokenize import get_tokenizer
#Tokenizer for the spell check
sc = get_tokenizer("en_US")
#Window 
window = tk.Tk()
#Text box to be checked
words = tk.Text(width=50)
sc
#Window layout
words.grid(row=1, column=1, padx=1.5, pady=1.5)
window.mainloop()

Answer 1

Ideally you need something to tell you the text content has changed and then get the data and run the enchant functions on it. You can then indicate misspellings using a text widget tag to change the appearance of the word.

Here is an example.

"""Text widget with spell checking.

Requires installation of pyenchant
"""

import tkinter as tk
import tkinter.ttk as ttk
from enchant import Dict, tokenize
import sys

class SpellcheckText(tk.Text):
    locale = 'en_US'
    def __init__(self, master, **kwargs):
        self.afterid = None
        self.corpus = Dict(self.locale)
        self.tokenize = tokenize.get_tokenizer(self.locale)
        super(SpellcheckText, self).__init__(master, **kwargs)
        self._proxy = self._w + "_proxy"
        self.tk.call("rename", self._w, self._proxy)
        self.tk.createcommand(self._w, self._proxycmd)
        self.tag_configure('sic', foreground='red')
        self.bind('<<TextModified>>', self.on_modify)

    def _proxycmd(self, command, *args):
        """Intercept the Tk commands to the text widget and if eny of the content
        modifying commands are called, post a TextModified event."""
        cmd = (self._proxy, command)
        if args:
            cmd = cmd + args
        result = self.tk.call(cmd)
        if command in ('insert', 'delete', 'replace'):
            self.event_generate('<<TextModified>>')
        return result

    def on_modify(self, event):
        """Rate limit the spell-checking with a 100ms delay. If another modification
        event comes in within this time, cancel the after call and re-schedule."""
        try:
            if self.afterid:
                self.after_cancel(self.afterid)
            self.afterid = self.after(100, self.on_modified)
        except Exception as e:
            print(e)

    def on_modified(self):
        """Handle the spell check once modification pauses.
        The tokenizer works on lines and yields a list of (word, column) pairs
        So iterate over the words and set a sic tag on each spell check failed word."""
        self.afterid = None
        self.tag_remove('sic', '1.0', 'end')
        num_lines = [int(val) for val in self.index("end").split(".")][0]
        for line in range(1, num_lines):
            data = self.get(f"{line}.0 linestart", f"{line}.0 lineend")
            for word,pos in self.tokenize(data):
                check = self.corpus.check(word)
                print(f"{word},{pos},{check}")
                if not check:
                    start = f"{line}.{pos}"
                    end = f"{line}.{pos + len(word)}"
                    self.tag_add("sic", start, end)


class App(ttk.Frame):
    def __init__(self, master, **kwargs):
        super(App, self).__init__(master, **kwargs)
        master.wm_withdraw()
        self.create_ui()
        self.grid(row=0, column=0, sticky=tk.NSEW)
        master.grid_rowconfigure(0, weight=1)
        master.grid_columnconfigure(0, weight=1)
        master.wm_deiconify()

    def create_ui(self):
        text = SpellcheckText(self)
        vs = ttk.Scrollbar(self, command=text.yview)
        text.configure(yscrollcommand=vs.set)
        text.grid(row=0, column=0, sticky=tk.NSEW)
        vs.grid(row=0, column=1, sticky=tk.NSEW)
        self.grid_rowconfigure(0, weight=1)
        self.grid_columnconfigure(0, weight=1)

def main(args=None):
    root = tk.Tk()
    app = App(root)
    root.mainloop()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.exit(main(sys.argv[1:]))