What are the potential pitfalls of using a word filter in PHP to block certain words?

Using a word filter in PHP to block certain words can be problematic because it may inadvertently block innocent words that contain the filtered words as substrings. To solve this issue, you can use a more advanced filtering technique such as using regular expressions to match whole words instead of substrings. 

$filteredWords = array('badword1', 'badword2');
$string = "This is a sentence with badword1 and badword2.";

foreach ($filteredWords as $word) {
    $string = preg_replace("/\b$word\b/i", "***", $string);
}

echo $string;

Keywords

word filter PHP censorship blacklist false positives

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