If you don't know, Hunspell is the spell checker engine of OpenOffice.org, and it's also included in the Opera and Mozilla browsers.

We were trying to use it from Perl, using the old Text::Hunspell module, version 1.3, but we had problems with it. Big problems. Like segfaults and tests that wouldn't run.

A bright hacker from Italy :) was then called in to fix the problem, with the promise of a fantastic prize he hasn't seen yet… [ping?] :-)

During the process, I found out I know absolutely nothing about dictionary files and stuff, and my fixes were – I would say – definitely horrible.

But! There's a bright side, of course, and that is that the module works just fine now, at least on Debian/Ubuntu systems. Before using Text::Hunspell, you want to install the following packages:

• hunspell
• libhunspell-dev

The example in the POD documentation (and in the examples dir) uses the standard US english dictionary. If you don't have that, you will need to change the script slightly. But the code is tested and should work without a problem. If you try it out and you have feedback, by all means let me know. Thanks!

Source code available on GitHub at:
http://github.com/cosimo/perl5-text-hunspell/

The module, tagged as 2.00 because it's cool :), will be up on CPAN shortly at this address:
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-Hunspell/