Re: adult content censoring

Hello Andy, Sunday, April 25, 2004, 3:22:29 PM, you wrote: AB> i have to make an adult content censoring system so people cant post "bad" AB> words on any public viewable posts. i know preg_replace and possibaly AB> preg_match would be a huge help but im wondering how i would put all the bad AB> words in a file (textfile) 1 word on a line and have it look through the AB> file for the words? when it finds a match then it will either replace the AB> word with * but better yet tell the user that content in the post was AB> rejected because of bad content and take them back to the form with the AB> stuff they typed in it... The way I do it on a piece of forum software I wrote on a VERY popular web site was as follows: Create an include file which contains all your badwords in an array, like: $badword[] = 'well'; $badword[] = 'you'; $badword[] = 'get'; $badword[] = 'the'; $badword[] = 'idea'; Then I have a simple function as follows: function APL_Func_BadWord ($text) { global $badwords; // This will check our given text against the badword list. It does it slightly differently // in that instead of firing up the regular expression engine, we use a more simple but just as effective technique: // Get the length of the text $original_length = strlen($text); // Now strip out ANY of the "bad words" using the fast str_replace and count the result $stripped_length = strlen(str_replace($badwords, '', strtolower($text))); // In PHP5 we will use the str_ireplace function instead of needing strtolower: // $stripped_length = strlen(str_ireplace($badwords, '', $text)); // If the two lengths are different, the pos contained a badword - simple as that! if ($original_length <> $stripped_length) { return true; } else { return false; } } and that's it - I pass any string I need to this whenever someone posts a message, subject, etc etc and it hasn't failed me yet :) (unless the bad word isn't in your list of course!) -- Best regards, Richard Davey http://www.phpcommunity.org/wiki/296.html