spelling

Tools for Spell Checking in R

Spell checking common document formats including latex, markdown, manual pages, and description files. Includes utilities to automate checking of documentation and vignettes as a unit test during ‘R CMD check’. Both British and American English are supported out of the box and other languages can be added. In addition, packages may define a ‘wordlist’ to allow custom terminology without having to abuse punctuation.

Spell Check Single Files

The function spell_check_files automatically parses known text formats and only spell checks text blocks, not code chunks.

spell_check_files('README.md', lang = 'en_US')
#   WORD       FOUND IN
# AppVeyor   README.md:5
# CMD        README.md:12
# RStudio    README.md:8

For more information about the underlying spelling engine and how to add support for other languages, see the hunspell package.

screenshot

Spell Check a Package

Spell check documentation, description, readme, and vignettes of a package:

spell_check_package("~/workspace/V8")
# DESCRIPTION does not contain 'Language' field. Defaulting to 'en-US'.
#   WORD          FOUND IN
# ECMA          V8.Rd:16, description:2,4
# emscripten    description:5
# htmlwidgets   JS.Rd:16
# JSON          V8.Rd:33,38,39,57,58,59,121
# jsonlite      V8.Rd:42
# Ooms          V8.Rd:41,121
# th            description:3
# Xie           JS.Rd:26
# Yihui         JS.Rd:26

Review these words and then update the wordlist to allow them:

update_wordlist("~/workspace/V8")
# The following words will be added to the wordlist:
#  - ECMA
#  - emscripten
#  - htmlwidgets
#  - JSON
#  - jsonlite
#  - Ooms
#  - th
#  - Xie
#  - Yihui
# Are you sure you want to update the wordlist?
# 1: Yes
# 2: No

Then these will no longer be marked as errors:

> spell_check_package("~/workspace/V8")
No spelling errors found.

Automate Package Spell Checking

Use spell_check_setup() to add a unit test to your package which automatically runs a spell check on documentation and vignettes during R CMD check if the environment variable NOT_CRAN is set to TRUE. By default this unit test never fails; it merely prints potential spelling errors to the console.

spell_check_setup("~/workspace/V8")
# Adding 'Language: en-US' to DESCRIPTION
# No changes required to /Users/jeroen/workspace/V8/inst/WORDLIST
# Updated /Users/jeroen/workspace/V8/tests/spelling.R

Note that the NOT_CRAN variable is automatically set to 1 on Travis and in devtools or RStudio, otherwise you need to set it yourself:

export NOT_CRAN=1
R CMD check V8_1.5.9000.tar.gz
# * using log directory ‘/Users/jeroen/workspace/V8.Rcheck’
# * using R version 3.5.1 (2018-07-02)
# * using platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
# ...
# ...
# * checking tests ...
#   Running ‘spelling.R’
#   Comparing ‘spelling.Rout’ to ‘spelling.Rout.save’ ... OK
#   Running ‘testthat.R’
#  OK