Making a profanity filter???

MtPHP

How can I make a good profanity filter for forms in my webpage using PHP...if needed I also have MySQL

Thanks!

nnichols

You need some method for storing the words that you are going to filter for. You can do this with either a text file of with your database. It makes no odds which method you choose, though personally I tend to opt for db.

Then you need to loop through your list of words replacing them if they exist in the content.

$sql = "SELECT words FROM tbl_filter";
$res = mysql_query($sql);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($res)) {
$word = $row['words'];
$replace = 'naughty word';
str_replace ( $word, $replace, $content);
}

You could do this by passing all of the words from the db into the "str_replace()" function as an array.

This is just a simple example, but you should be able to get the idea.

There are a few examples on HotScripts.com that might give you more ideas.

Hope this helps 😉

SensualSandwich

With PHP you will want to use regular expressions(http://www.php.nt/manual/en/ref.regex.php) to initially match the profrane text that is pullled from a word bank(database).

planetsim

With PHP you will want to use regular expressions(http://www.php.nt/manual/en/ref.regex.php) to initially match the profrane text that is pullled from a word bank(database).

Err no you wouldnt
you dont need regex for this

i recommend instead of using str_replace eregi_replace although it is slower

It is case insenstive meaning that if i typed paul as the word to get rid of

PaUl would be gotten rid of.

Weedpacket

I'd recommend preg_replace() myself;

it's faster
can handle case-insensitive matching quite well, thank you
if you like you can ensure that only entire words are matched (and not bits that appear inside words)
you can do all the replacements simultaneously, without needing a loop.

But beware; English is more complex than any existing programming language, and certainly more complex than any possible regular expression. Someone who wanted to censor "ass" got into trouble. Consider , ume, b, wipe, arse, parse, b***oon...