You can flip your bad word array and do the same checking much faster. Define each bad word as a key of the array. For example,
//define global variable that is available to too part of php script
//you don't want to redefine the array each time you call the function
//as a work around you may write a class if you don't want global variable
$GLOBALS['bad_words']= array('truck' => true, 'shot' => true);
function containsBadWord($str){
//get rid of extra white spaces at the end and beginning of the string
$str= trim($str);
//replace multiple white spaces next to each other with single space.
//So we don't have problem when we use explode on the string(we dont want empty elements in the array)
$str= preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $str);
$word_list= explode(" ", $str);
foreach($word_list as $word){
if( isset($GLOBALS['bad_words'][$word]) ){
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
$string = "This dude is a mothertrucker";
if ( !containsBadWord($string) ){
//doesn't contain bad word
}
else{
//contains bad word
}
In this code we are just checking if an index exist rather than comparing bad word with all the words in the bad word list.
isset is much faster than in_array and marginally faster than array_key_exists.
Make sure none of the values in bad word array are set to null.
isset will return false if the array index is set to null.