All PHP Quick Lessons
Rahil Shaikh  

PHP Word Censor

Hi all , this is our first post in the “PHP quick lessons” series .In this post we will be creating a small fun word censoring program with php.
Word censoring is hiding unacceptable words from the audience.For eg.(idiot → *****)
A basic use case could be a forum or a website where other anonymous users can comment.
To do this you will require to have some basic knowledge of php and html forms.
Lets first create a simple form which will accept user input.

 <form action="" method="POST">
    <textarea style="width: 100%;
height: 200px;" name="data" col="60" row="20" placeholder="Type any thing containing words like 'idiot','noob','geek'"></textarea><br>
    <input type="submit" value="Post Comment"/>
</form>

Check out the demo here : Word Censor using PHP
Submit method can be GET or POST but usually user would be posting lots of data to so POST should be prefered .
 
Now lets write a php script that will retrieve the user entered data(on the same page)
 

<?php
   echo $_POST['data'];
?>

This will print the data onto the page but wait thats not enough, lets add some validations to it.

<?php
if(isset($_POST['data']){           // this checks if the user has submitted the form.
    $usercomment = $_POST['data'];
    if(!empty($usercomment)){       // this checks if the data entered is not empty
        echo $_POST['data'];
    }else{
        echo 'please enter some text';
    }
}
?>

I’ve  added inline comments to help you understand the use of each ‘if’ loop.
Now lets create an array that will hold the list of words to be censored .

$list = array('idiot','noob','Geek');
$replace = array('i***t','**ob','****');

We will declare these at the top.
 
To accomplish our mission we will be using str_replace() function no actually str_ireplace().
The difference between the two is that the later is case insensitive.Lets move ahead and finish what we started .So our final code will look like this.

<?php
$list = array('idiot','noob','Geek');
$replace = array('i***t','**ob','****');

if(isset($_POST['data'])){          // this checks if the user has submitted the form.
    $usercomment = $_POST['data'];
    if(!empty($usercomment)){       // this checks if the data entered is not empty
        $censored_output = str_ireplace($list,$replace,$usercomment);
                        echo $censored_output;
    }else{
        echo 'please enter some text';
    }
}
?>
<form action="" method="POST">
    <textarea style="width: 100%;
height: 200px;" name="data" col="60" row="20" placeholder="Type any thing containing words like 'idiot','noob','geek'"></textarea><br>
    <input type="submit" value="Post Comment"/>
</form>

(Copy paste the above code into a php file and run it on a server or local server(xampp) with php installed)

 

Explanation for  str_ireplace($list,$replace,$usercomment);
 
$list =  list of words to be censored;
$replace = List of corresponding censored words.
$usercomment  = string to be operated (In our case our user input.)

Of-course this is a basic example of how the sr_ireplace function works but can be used in may other cases.

rahil471

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