spell checking jupyter notebooks

Writing correctly should be a priority, even for programmers and scientists.

But this is not easy in jupyter notebooks.

In english, a good solution is to make use of the spellchecker notebook extension, which highlights incorrect text:

pip install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions
jupyter contrib nbextension install --user
jupyter nbextension enable spellchecker/main

However, this extension is currently not able to suggest corrections, and is only available for English.

Since I write blog posts based on jupyter notebooks in French, I came up with a small script for spell checking.

Installation:

pip install nbspellcheck

Example of use:

nbspellcheck.py my_jupyter_notebook.ipynb -l fr

A big thank you to the developers of

• nltk : python natural language toolkit
• pyspellchecker : python spell checker

that are doing all the heavy lifting.

I made this real fast, and the user interface can be improved. Please don't hesitate to send a PR.