Filter out Spam Words using PHP Function

Many situations we want to be able to detect if a post/comment is spam by checking to see if it contains a list of spam/forbidden words. The following provides a PHP function spamCheck which takes the content and will return true if the text contains any of the forbidden words.

<?php
$SPAMWORDS = [
    "SpamWord1",
    "SpamWord2",
];

function containsWord($str, $word) {
    return !!preg_match('#\\b' . preg_quote($word, '#') . '\\b#i', $str);
}

function spamCheck($content) {
    global $SPAMWORDS;
    foreach ($SPAMWORDS as $w) {
        if (containsWord($content, $w)) {
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

We can define the list of spam words, and the text searching is based on regex (regular expression) – and it will match the word boundary only meaning the “HelloWorld” won’t match word “Hello” or “World” but “Hello World” will match.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —