2019-03-13 11:16:13

Hello!
I would like to use an english dictionary in one of my programs. I remember that MR. Erven implemented it in the Brainstation demo. How it is supposed to work and where I can look for it?

If you want to contact me, do not use the forum PM. I respond once a year or two, when I need to write a PM myself. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Telegram: Nuno69a
E-Mail: nuno69a (at) gmail (dot) com

2019-03-13 22:34:30

Usually APIs require keys to limit the usage and offer different pricing and also to prevent denial of service attacks. However, I did find one that doesn't require any key. It uses dict.org, there is a C# client app consuming this api on this web page: http://www.aonaware.com/dictservicesample.htm.

It seemed a bit dated, so I tried it out and it still works. You can download the zip on that page and try the command line tool for yourself, just pass the arguments "define wheel" to the exe and it will output the definition of wheel. It supports a lot of different sources, you can limit your search to only one dictionary if you like. There is a help on all of the command line options of course.

You have access to the C# source code, it shouldn't be too complicated if you know C# or Java. Don't get confused with all the command line parsing code. If you are doing your app in a different language, you will only care about the calls made to the API, just read the code or use the app while capturing the HTTP traffic with Fiddler, it's a web proxy and it's fairly accessible. Hope it helps.

Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another. ― Lemony Snicket

2019-03-13 22:40:35 (edited by Origine 2019-03-15 08:03:04)

You can also download this text file and parse it: https://sites.google.com/a/vhhscougars. … ionary.txt

Take a look at it, as if it suits your needs, it's gonna be really fast in your program. You can transform this file into a preprocessed format for your application, load it when it starts and have offline really fast lookup. I don't know if it is obvious to you, but use a hashed associative collection for constant time lookup, linear lookup could get long with that many words.

Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another. ― Lemony Snicket

2019-03-13 22:43:31

Thank you. Ot really helped. I will look in all of it later.
Thank you once more!

If you want to contact me, do not use the forum PM. I respond once a year or two, when I need to write a PM myself. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Telegram: Nuno69a
E-Mail: nuno69a (at) gmail (dot) com

2019-03-14 10:22:33

Is it me or the text file link is broken?

Ivan M. Soto.
Feel free to check out my work and services.
http://ims-productions.com

2019-03-15 08:04:37

Yeah, don't know what happened there, I fixed the link and clicked it to see that it really works this time. sorry for that.

Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another. ― Lemony Snicket