Form Validation of a Text Field

AHoward007

I want to validate user entries in a text field where the entry must be a valid English word.

What is the most practical way to do this?

I was thinking about downloading an English dictionary database of words and then programming a search query to see if the entered word exists in the database.

Has anyone tried this or have any other suggestions for a better way to do this?

Would this method be feasible under heavy usage i.e. multiple users entering data at the same time? Or would searching through a database this size by multiple users cause the system to slow to a crawl?

NogDog

Are you talking about the user submitting a single word and verifying whether it exists in your dictionary? If so, that would be fairly simple and quite quick if the dictionary table is properly indexed for the job. If you're talking about the user entering phrases/sentences/paragraphs and checking that each word is valid (and dealing with things like contractions and hyphenated words), that could get uglier simply because you'd likely have to explode the text into individual words and query each one against the database (unless there's a slicker way of doing that which has not yet occurred to me).

AHoward007

Yes, just a single word.

Bjom

Would PSPell be an option?

Bjom

anoopmail

or u could use of any webservice available.(not sure about a free one)

AHoward007

I am trying to use the Pspell function to do this word check. The first step according to the reference I'm using is to check if pspell extension is enabled on my PHP server. The book says to confirm if pspell is enabled, run phpinfo(). So I did along with the initial pspell command the book told me to write to check to see if I have the Pspell library installed.

<?php
phpinfo();
$dict_config = pspell_config_create('en', 'american');
?>

The program above doesn't show Pspell enabled anywhere. The following error msg displays after phpinfo runs:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function pspell_config_create() in C:\wamp\www\MONOLINGUA HTML-KIT\pspell.php on line 10

I'm running PHP vers. 5.2.9-1. I'm not clear how to add this extension or if the fatal error is even caused by the function not being enabled. Any suggestions?

Bjom

Yes that simply means PSPell is not yet installed. Did you do anything to install it yet?

AHoward007

I loaded the above Php script onto my web host and the program ran fine. Phpinfo() clearly shows Pspell Support as being enabled and no Fatal Errors msgs popped up which confirms the problem resides in my PC's local server.

I searched the internet for Pspell extension support. Pspell has been replaced by Aspell. I downloaded the Aspell program file as well as the Aspell English library file and placed them together in the c:\wamp\www localhost directory.

It didn't work. The docmentation isn't very clear on what additional configuration is necessary to get it to run.

I'm also not very clear on what the

$dict_config=pspell_config_create('en','american');

script is attempting to do.

I am wondering if I have to manually place the Aspell.dll file in one of the folders i.e. cgi-bin and rebooting in order to get it to work.