What best practices should be followed when implementing a badword filter function in PHP to avoid unintentional censorship?

When implementing a badword filter function in PHP, it is important to avoid unintentional censorship by considering context and variations of words. One way to address this is by using a whitelist of allowed words or phrases to prevent false positives. Additionally, using regular expressions with word boundaries can help ensure that only exact matches are filtered. 

function filterBadWords($text, $badwords) {
    $whitelist = array("goodword1", "goodword2");
    
    $filteredText = preg_replace_callback('/\b(' . implode('|', $badwords) . ')\b/i', function($match) use ($whitelist) {
        if (in_array(strtolower($match[1]), $whitelist)) {
            return $match[0];
        } else {
            return str_repeat('*', strlen($match[1]));
        }
    }, $text);
    
    return $filteredText;
}

$badwords = array("badword1", "badword2");
$text = "This is a badword1 example of badword2 filtering.";

echo filterBadWords($text, $badwords);

Keywords

PHP badword filter censorship implementation unintentional

Related Questions