Fu-fu: The Profanity Filter for Rails

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

History

Disclaimer

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.

Example

You can use it in your models:

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 have their vowels replaced

  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 have their vowels replaced

You can also use the filter directly:

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

Benchmarks

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

TODO

• This plugin is not currently filtering words that are punctuation delimited (ex. ‘f-u-c-k’).
• Turn this into a gem (and move over to rspec)
• May break ProfanityFilter out on it’s own
• Clean up dictionary implementation and subsitution (suboptimal and messy)

Resources

Created by Adam Bair (adam@intridea.com) of Intridea (www.intridea.com) in the open source room at RailsConf 2008.