The Profanity Filter for Rails¶ ↑

This plugin will allow you to filter profanity using basic replacement or a dictionary term.

This plugin is provided as is - therefore, the creators and contributors of this plugin are not responsible for any damages that may result from it’s usage. Use at your own risk; backup your data.

gem install profanity_filter
or
./script/plugin install git://github.com/intridea/profanity_filter.git

Notice – there are two profanity filters, one is destructive. Beware the exclamation point (profanity_filter!).

Non-Destructive (filters content when called, original text remains in the database)

profanity_filter :foo, :bar
  #=> banned words will be replaced with @#=>$%

profanity_filter :foo, :bar, :method => 'dictionary'
  #=> banned words will be replaced by value in config/dictionary.yml

profanity_filter :foo, :bar, :method => 'vowels'
  #=> banned words will have their vowels replaced

profanity_filter :foo, :bar, :method => 'hollow'
  #=> all letters except the first and last will be replaced

profanity_filter :foo, :bar, :method => 'stars'
  #=> all letters will be replaced with *

The non-destructive profanity_filter provides different versions of the filtered attribute:
  some_model.foo => 'filtered version'
  some_model.foo_original => 'non-filtered version'

Destructive (saves the filtered content to the database)

profanity_filter! :foo, :bar
  #=> banned words will be replaced with @#=>$%

profanity_filter! :foo, :bar, :method => 'dictionary'
  #=> banned words will be replaced by value in config/dictionary.yml

profanity_filter! :foo, :bar, :method => 'vowels'
  #=> banned words will have their vowels replaced

profanity_filter! :foo, :bar, :method => 'hollow'
  #=> all letters except the first and last will be replaced

profanity_filter! :foo, :bar, :method => 'stars'
  #=> all letters will be replaced with *

ProfanityFilter::Base.clean(text)
ProfanityFilter::Base.clean(text, 'dictionary')
ProfanityFilter::Base.clean(text, 'vowels')
ProfanityFilter::Base.clean(text, 'hollow')

ProfanityFilter::Base.profane?(text) #=> true/false

Inquiring minds can checkout the simple benchmarks I’ve included so you can have an idea of what kind of performance to expect. I’ve included some quick scenarios including strings of (100, 1000, 5000, 1000) words and dictionaries of (100, 1000, 5000, 25000, 50000, 100000) words.

You can run the benchmarks via:

ruby test/benchmark/fu-fu_benchmark.rb

• May break ProfanityFilter out on it’s own

• Clean up dictionary implementation and substitution (suboptimal and messy)

• Move benchmarks into a rake task

• Build out rdocs

• Ability to supplement the profanity database (with a yaml outside of the gem) via @seankibler

• Easy custom blacklists/dictionaries (essentially the same as above)

The Profanity Filter for Rails uses the MIT License. Please see the MIT-LICENSE file.

Created by Adam Bair (adam@intridea.com) of Intridea (www.intridea.com) in the open source room at RailsConf 2008. Originally called Fu-fu: The Profanity Filter for Rails.

• Paul Cortens and Greg Benedict - profane? method and tests.

• Neil Ang - punctionation delimited profanity

• Flinn Mueller - dynamic word list from method

• Scott Stewert - additional dictionary words

• Nola Stowe - added stars filter

• Nick Wientge - removed dependency on ActiveRecord (now ORM agnostic)

• Jean Regisser - lazily load the dictionary