/*
 * Created on Mar 30, 2005
 */
package SimpleSpeller;

import java.util.List;

/** A class which determines whether words are spelled correctly.
 * 
 * Concrete implementations should have a public constructor which takes an
 * array of words (Strings) as its only argument, e.g.,
 *   public MySpellChecker(String[] dictionaryWords) {...}
 * The strings in the array should be non-null and non-empty after 
 * normalization.  The normalized forms of the words are considered
 * to be all and only the correct-spelled words in existence.
 */
public interface ISpellChecker {
    
    /** Convert a string to a normal form, in which any leading and trailing
     * spaces are stripped out, and any uppercase letters are converted
     * to lowercase; everything else in the string is unchanged.
     * @param originalWord any non-null string
     * @return a normalized string (which may be empty); a null string is
     * returned if the original string was null.
     */
    String normalize(String originalWord);
    
    /** Determine if a word (normalized) matches some (normalized) word
     * in the dictionary.
     * @param word a string, which may be empty but not null.
     * @return true iff the word (normalized) is an exact match
     * to some word in the dictionary.
     */
    boolean isCorrectlySpelled(String word);
    
}