Aspell and Python

[Kevin Atkinson]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2002, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:

> Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> ...
> 
> >You misunderstand.  word-list-compress simply compresses and decompresses 
> >a sorted word list to save space.  It is not used in any way by Aspell 
> >itself.
> >
> I understood that word-list-compress was an offline utility, but I'm not 
> sure what you're using to search the compressed word-list on disk.  That 
> is, how does _Aspell_ make use of the data once it's been compressed? 
>  Is it something like a bisect algo with an index somewhere on disk to 
> the items in the file?  (I gather by your reaction that the entire 
> word-list is not all loaded into memory at run-time).

Aspell does not use it directly.  It decompress it first.  A dictionary 
is created something like this:
  cat wordlist.cwl | word-list-compress d | aspell create master

In a read in one line at a time and then loaded into memory as the new 
dictionary is created.

Once a dictionary is created the compressed word-list is not used.

-- 
http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org