Checking for embarrassing words in a string

June 16th, 2009, by Mike Rogers to PHP

I was recently on YouTube and I noticed that did not check the shortened strings for potentially embarrassing shortenings of words.

YouTube's Cock Up How to make a great example?

Here is the code so you can shorten strings and check for potentially embrassing words.

<?php // String Cleaner â�� Cleans words you don't want out of strings. // Step 1 â�� Define the string and the words yoiu want to remove. $string = 'this is my silly input how cool is it?'; $words_to_remove ='silly|my|eggs'; // Seperate words with | this is regular expression. // Step 2 â�� shorten the string $string = substr($string, 0, 23); // This with return the first 23 characters (including spaces) in the string. // Step 3 â�� Remove the words echo preg_replace('#b('.$words_to_remove.')b#is', '', $string); // This will remove the // This would return: // this is input ?>