Many of us need to deal with user input, search queries, and situations where the input text can potentially contain profanity or undesirable language. Oftentimes this needs
I'm a little late to the party, but I have a solution that might work for some who read this. It's in javascript instead of php, but there's a valid reason for it.
Full disclosure, I wrote this plugin...
Anyways.
The approach I've gone with is to allow a user to "Opt-In" to their profanity filtering. Basically profanity will be allowed by default, but if my users don't want to read it, they don't have to. This also helps with the "l33t sp3@k" issue.
The concept is a simple jquery plugin that gets injected by the server if the client's account is enabling profanity filtering. From there, it's just a couple simple lines that blot out the swears.
Here's the demo page
https://chaseflorell.github.io/jQuery.ProfanityFilter/demo/
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result
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