Question

In summary I am trying to build a swear filter where I have a static array called “badWords” which holds many profane words.

My script then lifts all text values from a form into another array called “fieldValues”.

It then iterates through the fieldValues and should compare the string values with the whole array of “badWords” and if found trigger a simple response for now.

The code is not producing any errors but it is not producing expected outputs either, I was hoping you could give me insight into where I went wrong with it.

Code

// get all the inputs from "editor_form"
var $inputs = $('#editor_form :input');

var fieldValues = new Array();
var i = 0;

//for each field place it in array
$inputs.each(function() 
{
    fieldValues[i] = $(this).val();
    i++;
});

var swearWord;
for (i = 0; i < fieldValues.length; i++)
{
    if (fieldValues[i] == function()
    {
        //this bit i think is wrong, i think it only does one loop in this level then jumps back up
        for (x = 0; x < badWords.length; x++)
        {
            return badWords[x];
        }
    })

    //warning message   
    {
        window.alert("Bad word found");
    }       
}

Thanks

Answer 1

First, you can fix your existing code like this :

function isBad(word) {
     for (x = 0; x < badWords.length; x++) {
         if (badWords[x]==word) return true;
     }
     return false;
}
for (i = 0; i < fieldValues.length; i++) {
   if (isBad(fieldValues[i])) {
       window.alert("Bad word found : " + fieldValues[i]);
   }
}

But your bad words form, logically, a set, not an array. You should use an object as map to find them in a fast way.

// build a set of the bad words
var badWordsSet = {};
for (x = 0; x < badWords.length; x++) badWordsSet[badWords[x]]=true;
// then use it
for (i = 0; i < fieldValues.length; i++) {
   if (badWordsSet[fieldValues[i]]) {
       window.alert("Bad word found : " + fieldValues[i]);
   }
}