Wintertree Spell Check Applet
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Misspelled words not detected after "&" or "<"

Problem: If the text being checked contains a "&" or "<" character, Spell Check Applet seems to stop checking. It won't find any misspelled words after the "&" or "<" character.

Discussion: This behavior is by design. It occurs when the IGNORE_HTML_MARKUPS_OPT option is set to "true". When this option is set to "true," Spell Check Applet expects the text to contain correctly formatted HTML. In correctly formatted HTML, the "&" and "<" are special characters (known as meta-characters). The "&" character is used to signal the beginning of an HTML character entity, such as "&copy;" for a copyright symbol. The "<" is used to signal the beginning of an HTML markup, such as "<b>" for boldface. When Spell Check Applet sees these characters, it expects either a character entity or markup to follow. More accurately, it begins skipping text until it encounters the terminator of the character entity or markup, or the end of the line containing the text (whichever comes first). The terminator of a character entity is ";", and the terminator of a markup is ">". Thus, the appearance of "&" in the text acts like a switch that causes text to be skipped until a ";" appears (similarly for "<" and ">"). This behavior is documented in the Spell Check Applet user's guide in the description of the IGNORE_HTML_MARKUPS_OPT option.

Solution: Either do not set IGNORE_HTML_MARKUPS_OPT to "true," or ensure the text contains correctly formatted HTML. A literal "&" character should be entered as "&amp;", and a literal "<" character should be entered as "&lt;".