How do you implement a good profanity filter?

Obscenity Filters: Bad Idea, or Incredibly Intercoursing Bad Idea?

Also, one can't forget The Untold History of Toontown's SpeedChat, where even using a "safe-word whitelist" resulted in a 14 year old quickly circumventing it with: "I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny."

Bottom line: Ultimately, for any system that you implement, there is absolutely no substitute for human review (whether peer or otherwise). Feel free to implement a rudimentary tool to get rid of the drive-by's, but for the determined troll, you absolutely must have a non-algorithm-based approach.

A system that removes anonymity and introduces accountability (something that does well) is helpful also, particularly in order to help combat John Gabriel's G.I.F.T.

You also asked where you can get profanity lists to get you started -- one open-source project to check out is Dansguardian -- check out the source code for their default profanity lists. There is also an additional third party Phrase List that you can download for the proxy that may be a helpful gleaning point for you.

Edit in response the question edit: Thanks for the clarification on what you're trying to do. In that case, if you're just trying to do a simple word filter, there are two ways you can do it. One is to create a single long regexp with all of the banned phrases that you want to censor, and merely do a regex find/replace with it. A regex like:

$filterRegex = "(boogers|snot|poop|shucks|argh)"

and run it on your input string using preg_match() to wholesale test for a hit,

or preg_replace() to blank them out.

You can also load those functions up with arrays rather than a single long regex, and for long word lists, it may be more manageable. See the preg_replace() for some good examples as to how arrays can be used flexibly.

For additional PHP programming examples, see this page for a somewhat advanced generic class for word filtering that *'s out the center letters from censored words, and this previous question that also has a PHP example (the main valuable part in there is the SQL-based filtered word approach -- the leet-speak compensator can be dispensed with if you find it unnecessary).

You also added: "Getting the list of words in the first place is the real question." -- in addition to some of the previous Dansgaurdian links, you may find this handy .zip of 458 words to be helpful.

Is this the pattern you are looking for?

preg_match_all("/((|-d+|d+|-|+|/|*|))/", $input, $output);

https://regex101.com/r/acKW27/3

Preg_match_all: http://www.phpliveregex.com/p/l7L

I forgot / in the regex. Links updated also.

Here's a working example of Lucene.NET using a custom filter you might take a look at:

using System;
using System.Collections;
using Lucene.Net.Analysis;
using Lucene.Net.Documents;
using Lucene.Net.Index;
using Lucene.Net.Search;
using Lucene.Net.Store;

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Directory index = new RAMDirectory();
        Analyzer analyzer = new KeywordAnalyzer();
        IndexWriter writer = new IndexWriter(index, analyzer, true);

        Document doc = new Document();
        doc.Add(new Field("title", "t1", Field.Store.YES, 
            Field.Index.TOKENIZED));
        writer.AddDocument(doc);
        doc = new Document();
        doc.Add(new Field("title", "t2", Field.Store.YES, 
            Field.Index.TOKENIZED));
        writer.AddDocument(doc);

        writer.Close();

        Searcher searcher = new IndexSearcher(index);
        Query query = new MatchAllDocsQuery();
        Filter filter = new LuceneCustomFilter();
        Sort sort = new Sort("title", true);
        Hits hits = searcher.Search(query, filter, sort);
        IEnumerator hitsEnumerator = hits.Iterator();

        while (hitsEnumerator.MoveNext())
        {
            Hit hit = (Hit)hitsEnumerator.Current;
            Console.WriteLine(hit.GetDocument().GetField("title").
                StringValue());
        }
    }
}

public class LuceneCustomFilter : Filter
{
    public override BitArray Bits(IndexReader indexReader)
    {
        BitArray bitarray = new BitArray(indexReader.MaxDoc());

        int[] docs = new int[1];
        int[] freq = new int[1];

        TermDocs termDocs = indexReader.TermDocs(
                new Term(@"title", "t1"));

        int count = termDocs.Read(docs, freq);
        if (count == 1)
        {
            bitarray.Set(docs[0], true);
        }
        return bitarray;
    }
}