sarvan has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

hi there,

I installed cpan module Text::Spellchecker and all its dependencies properly. Installation was successful.

But, when i tried to run the synopsis code they hv given in cpan it given me the following error

<err> Can't call method "check" on an undefined value at /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1/Text/SpellChecker.pm line 263. 
use strict;
use warnings;

 use Text::SpellChecker;
    ($Text::SpellChecker::pre_hl_word,
     $Text::SpellChecker::post_hl_word) = (qw([ ]));

    my $checker = Text::SpellChecker->new(text => "Foor score and seve
+n yeers ago");

    while (my $word = $checker->next_word) {
        print $checker->highlighted_text, 
            "\n", 
            "$word : ",
            (join "\t", @{$checker->suggestions}),
            "\nChoose a new word : ";
        chomp (my $new_word = <STDIN>);
        $checker->replace(new_word => $new_word) if $new_word;
    }

    print "New text : ".$checker->text."\n";

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please give me suggestion why the error is coming.. Thanks..

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Text-SpellChecker error
by toolic (Bishop) on Jun 23, 2011 at 17:58 UTC
    I installed Text::SpellChecker. Your code runs for me without errors on perl version 5.8.9, but I get your error on version 5.12.2.

    I copied the relevant code from SpellChecker.pm and placed a comment on line 263: 

    sub next_word {
    my $self = shift;
    pos $self->{text} = $self->{position};
    my $word;
    my $sp = $self->_hunspell || $self->_aspell;
    while ($self->{text} =~ m/([a-zA-Z]+(?:'[a-zA-Z]+)?)/g) {
        $word = $1;
        next if $self->{ignore_list}{$word};
        last if !$sp->check($word);  # 263

    [download]

    There were many regex changes introduced in perl 5.10. I would start looking there. I have no time to investigate further right now. I would make a local copy of this .pm file and start adding print statements to debug it further.

    This should be submitted as a bug report. (Update: looks like the author is aware of this issue). Here is a reduced code example which still reproduces the error: 

    use warnings;
use strict;

use Text::SpellChecker;
my $checker = Text::SpellChecker->new( text => "Foor" );
my $word = $checker->next_word;

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Re: Text-SpellChecker error
by davido (Cardinal) on Jun 23, 2011 at 19:04 UTC

    I believe it's a dependency issue related to the GNU Aspell library. You need the library installed along with its development headers. On Ubuntu Linux I installed the following packages via sudo apt-get:

    • libtext-aspell-perl
    • libpspell-dev

    libpspell-dev brought in another dependency at the same time: libaspell-dev

    Once I got those packages installed your snippet no longer produced the error you reported, for Perl 5.14.0.


    Dave

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Re: Text-SpellChecker error
by bduggan (Pilgrim) on Jun 23, 2011 at 19:44 UTC
    Text::Spellchecker can use either Text::Aspell or Text::Hunspell as a backend. Which do you have installed?

    (On a side note, can anyone tell me what the best practices are for representing alternative dependencies in a cpan module?)

    Brian
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      Text::SpellChecker is with a capital C (pretty important if one uses copy/paste to install them with cpan to see what is wrong).

      toolic already found that there is some difference in the behavior under different perl versions. Note that Text::Hunspell's install under perl-5.14 is in need of an update:

      Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated at inc/Devel/CheckLib.pm l
+ine 191.

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      Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn
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        Thanks. I reproduced the error but it only occurred because Text::Hunspell was missing in my install of perl 5.14. I released a new version of Text::SpellChecker yesterday with some better tests, and more diagnostics on failure (since there are a number of ways that the failure in the OP can occur : missing dictionaries, custom installation paths, ...)
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