Question : Ruby Swear Word Filter

Hi all, trying to make a swear word filter and i got this piece off of some website:

class String
      def to_clean_english(bad_words = %w(stupid moron dumbass retard))
        bad_words.inject(self) { |clean_sentence, insult| clean_sentence.gsub /#{insult}/i, '*' * insult.size }
      end
end

the problem is that if you have a word like assassin and ass is in your blacklist... it will filter out the assassin... even tho that is technically ok.

So basically, i need to add a whitelist of words... can anyone suggest an efficient way of going about this?

thanks,

Bob

Answer : Ruby Swear Word Filter

More simply,
You could use word boundary (\b)
so you don't need these silly replacements
(I mistakenly thought the \b would fail on the beginning of the sentence)

class String
      def to_clean_english(bad_words = %w(stupid moron ass retard))
                        str = bad_words.inject(self) { |clean_sentence, insult| clean_sentence.gsub /\b#{insult}\b/i, '*' * insult.size }
      end
end

The only difference with your original solution is that it only matches "ass" if "ass" is a whole word in the sentence, not if it is part of a word.
I very much prefere this approach over having a whitelist.
Let me know if you really want to use a whitelist

cheers

Geert