Spell check: ignoring soft hyphens

[Stan Brown]

Apologies if this is a basic question, but I've read the documentation
on spelling multiple times and must be missing the answer. Ive also
checked the FAQ and the group archives.

GVim 7.4, running in Windows 7 and 8. I use only 8-bit characters, in
Windows-1252 encoding (set enc=latin1 in Vim).

My question: I frequently use the soft hyphen (character 173, or 255
in octal) in HTML documents. How can I tell Vim to ignore these
characters for purposes of spell check?

For example, I want Vim to consider "pur<173>pose" as a good word
because "purpose" is a good word. I don't expect Vim to know what is
correct syllabication, just to ignore any soft hyphen when it's deciding
whether a word is spelled correctly.

Currently I handle this by putting "pur<173>pose" in my word list
file, but obviously I don't want to do that with every possible
hyphenation of every possible good word.

--
Stan Brown
Tehachapi, CA, USA
https://BrownMath.com
https://OakRoadSystems.com