LotS of websites nowadays have incorporated interactive features, such as blogs, comments, views, ete. These allow visitors to post their comments online. While it's good to have such features, they can also become a lia¬bility when users start posting offensive or derogatory comments on the website. That ultimately affects the website's repu¬tation.
If you are also struggling to save your website's reputation, then here's a simple way out.

In this article, we provide you a PHP code snippet that will help you stop banned words from being posted on your website or blog, by anonymous visitors.

First of all, list down all words in a text file that you want to ban. Then, write down a function 'check_offensive_ word()', which will be responsible for checking each word written on your website for being an offensive word.The code

for the same is as follows: <?php
function language_filter($string) { $offensive = @file("path/to/your/file/bad_lang.dat" );
foreach ($offensive as $curse_word) { if (stristr(trim($string),$curse_word» { $length = strlen($curse_word); for ($i = 1; $i <= $length; $i++)
}
$string =
e reg_rep la ce ( $ curse_word. $sta rs, tri m ($ string»;
$stars = "";

When the string is passed to this function, the string is parsed and checked for any offensive word that you have specified in the file 'bad_lang.dat'. It takes a word at a time from the string and checks if the word is present in the 'bad_Iang.dat'. If the word is present in the list of offensive words then it simply calculates the length of the word and replaces it with a sequence o['*'s.
The 'ere~replace' is an in-built func¬tion in PHP which replaces offensive words with the character you define, which in this case is '*'.
For testing this, write the following code snippet:
<?php
$string = "test for offensive words."; print language_filter($string);
If you have defined the word 'offen¬sive' in your banned words list, then the output of the above code will be:
This little code will make your web-
pages a little cleaner.