P5-regexp-common-profanity_us

Provide regexes for U.S. profanity

Instead of a dry technical overview, I am going to explain the structure of this module based on its history. I consult at a company that generates customer leads primarily by having websites that attract people e.g. lowering loan values, selling cars, buying real estate, etc.. For some reason we get more than our fair share of profane leads. For this reason I was told to write a profanity checker.

For the data that I was dealing with, the profanity was most often in the email address or in the first or last name, so I naively started filtering profanity with a set of regexps for that sort of data. Note that both names and email addresses are unlike what you are reading now they are not whitespace-separated text, but are instead labels.

Therefore full support for profanity checking should work in 2 entirely different contexts labels email, names and text what you are reading. Because open-source is driven by demand and I have no need for detecting profanity in text, only label is implemented at the moment. And you know the next sentence “patches welcome”