Question

How can I check if data submitted from a form or querystring has certain words in it?

I’m trying to look for words containing admin, drop, create etc in form [Post] data and querystring data so I can accept or reject it.

I’m converting from ASP to PHP. I used to do this using an array in ASP (keep all illegal words in a string and use ubound to check the whole string for those words), but is there a better (efficient) way to do this in PHP?

Eg: A string like this would be rejected: “The administrator dropped a blah blah” because it has admin and drop in it.

I intend using this to check usernames when creating accounts and for other things too.

Thanks

Answer 1

You could use stripos()

int stripos ( string $haystack , string $needle [, int $offset = 0 ] )

You could have a function like:

function checkBadWords($str, $badwords) {
    foreach ($badwords as $word) {
        if (stripos(" $str ", " $word ") !== false) {
            return false;
        }
    }
    return true;
}

And to use it:

if (!checkBadWords('something admin', array('admin')) {
    // ...
}