通过阅读网站创建拼写检查器

Question

For my computer science class we are to create a program that has the user input a word and we take that word and guess to see if it is spelled right. We are inputting the word into dictionary.com and reading it from their.

We are adding the word they inputted to the dictionary.com url and then we check to see if that word shows up on the website. If it does it is spelled correctly and then if it's not it's not spelled correctly. Here is the code for reading the URL:

URL url = new URL("http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=" + word);

        // open a buffered reader on the url
        InputStream inStr = url.openStream();

        BufferedReader reader = 
          new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inStr));

When they do spell the word correctly everything works out great but when they spell it incorrectly it throws a file not found exception. It is throwing this because if you search a word on dictionary.com it changes the link. Where it would usually be "www.dictionary.com/search?q=word" it changes to " http://www.dictionary.com/misspelling?term=wrod&s=t "

Because it changes the link, it throws the exception and the program does not work. Does anybody have any suggestions on what I should do or change? Thank you!

Answer 1

Hacky way: Catch the exception and return "not a word." The problem with that approach is that if the website is unavailable it will return "not a word."

Best way: check to see if you get a HTTP 200 code or an HTTP 302 (the redirect) and return "not a word."

Answer 2

I agree with the highly voted comment that you should catch the exception, but I would recommend that you use the HttpURLConnection class to make your GET call to dictionary.com with a given word. If you follow the pattern below, you can still capture any error stream coming from the site. And you should be able to parse the response and check to make sure that in fact it came from a wrong word. There is the possibility of an exception happening for some other reason, you should not necessarily count this as the word not being found.

String url = "http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=" + word";

URL obj = new URL(url);
HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) obj.openConnection();
con.setRequestMethod("GET");

int responseCode = con.getResponseCode();
// check the response code if you wish
InputStream inputStream = null;
try {
    inputStream = con.getInputStream();
}
catch (IOException exception) {
    inputStream = con.getErrorStream();
}
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream));

Update:

I just tried entering a word which could not be found, and the HTTP response code is 404 . So you might be able to get away with just checking the response code for 404 , or to be more thorough you could even parse the error stream.