633443 - Spell-checker marks hyphens (dashes, minus signs) as spelling errors.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 633210

(Core :: Spelling checker, defect)

Description

[Screwtape]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110210 Firefox/4.0b12pre
Build Identifier: 

Recently a change was checked into Firefox that made it submit hyphenated words to the spell-checker as an entire unit, rather than submitting each hyphen-delimited chunk (bug 355178, I read about it here: http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2011-02-09/important-changes-firefox-4-spell-checker). Unfortunately, this seems to have caused Firefox to look up individual hyphens in the spell-checker, which of course aren't found.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Find a text box.
2. Type the sentence "I hope you - and your family - are well."
Actual Results:  
Both hyphens in the sentence are drawn with wavy red underlines indicating spelling errors.

Expected Results:  
No spelling errors should be marked.

Since hyphens are much easier to type than the various Unicode punctuation characters, they get pressed into use in text-fields for various purposes including:

 - bullet points
 - the subtraction operator (6 - 3)
 - dashes - between clauses - used to mark parenthetical text. Traditionally 
   this is done with an em-dash, often rendered in ASCII as "--".

All the "-" examples above, and "--", are marked as spelling errors.

I'm using an en_AU dictionary at the moment, but if I switch to the Firefox-default en_US dictionary (via the context menu) the wavy underlines remain.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Should be fixed in tomorrow's builds.  Please reopen if it's not?