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I have a robot voice that turns sentences into spoken mp3 files.
But the robot voice can't pronounce urls so I want to filter the urls out.
I got dynamic strings coming in that can look like this:
"Hello my name is Jeffrey"
This works fine but strings can also contains urls and looks like this:
"Hello http://wwww.google.nl is a very nice site."
or
"Hello how are you doing https://soundcloud.com/theforeignexchangemusic/zo-manmade-sampler …"
or
"Take a look at this picture http://instagram.com/p/xPiSn8Pmli/ "
And so on
If a string contains an url I want to replace the url with a word.
Does anybody know a good way of doing this?
Because the strings are dynamic (Length, content and location) I find it very hard to do.
If someone has a good idea please let me know!
Would be appreciated a lot.
Your best bet is to use RegEx to parse the strings to see if URLs come up.
Using RegEx to then find the base domain and then vocalize that.
/^(https?://)?([\da-z.-]+).([a-z.]{2,6})([/\w .-])/?$/ Regex for URLs
For more reference
For Parsing your URL
If somebody is looking for exactly the same thing here is a working example.
<?php
$hallo = 'Hey it works. http://onderbroekenlol.nl something behind the url.';
$str = preg_replace("/(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:[\w]+\.)([a-zA-Z\.]{2,6})([\/\w\.-]*)*\/?/", "a website", $hallo);
print $str;
?>
Assume "xyza" is a bad word. I'm using following method to replace offensive words-
$text = str_replace("x***","(Offensive words detected & removed!)",$text);
This code will replace xyza into "(Offensive words detected & removed!)".
But problem is "Case" if someone type XYZA my code can't detect it. How to solve it?
No matter what you do, users will find ways to get around your filters. They will use unicode characters (аss, for example, uses a Cyrillic а and will not get captured by any of the regex solutions). They will use spaces, dollar signs, asterisks, whatever you haven't managed to catch yet.
If family-friendliness is essential to your application, have a person review the content before it goes live. Otherwise, add a flag feature so other people can flag offensive content. Better yet, use some sort of machine learning or Bayesian filter to automatically flag potentially offensive posts and have humans check them out manually. People read human languages better than computers.
The problem with whitelists/blacklists is—as other users have pointed out—your users will make it their priority to find ways around your filter for satisfaction rather than using your website for what it was intended for, whatever that may be.
One approach would be to use Google’s undocumented profanity API it created for its “What Do You Love?” website. If you get a response of true then just give the user a message saying their post couldn’t be submitted due to detected profanity.
You could approach this as follows:
<?php
if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {
$result = json_decode(file_get_contents(sprintf('http://www.wdyl.com/profanity?q=%s', urlencode($_POST['comments']))));
if ($result->response == true) {
// profanity detected
}
else {
// save comments to database as normal
}
}
Other answers and comments say that programming is not the best solution to this problem. I agree with them. Those answers should be moved to Moderators - Stack Exchange or Webmasters - Stack Exchange.
Since this is stackoverflow, my answer is going to be based on computer programming.
If you want to use str_replace, do something like this.
For the sake of this post, since some people are offended by actual cusswords, let's pretend that these are bad words:
'fug', 'schnitt', 'dam'.
$text = str_ireplace(" fug ","(Offensive words detected & removed!)",$text);
Notice, it's str_ireplace not str_replace. The i is for "case insensitive".
But that will erroneously match "fuggedaboudit," for example.
If you want to do a more reliable job, you need to use regex.
$bad_text = "Fug dis schnitt, because a schnitter never dam wins a fuggin schnitting darn";
$hit_words = array("fug","schnitt","dam"); // these words are 'hits' that we need to replace. hit words...
array_walk($hit_words, function(&$value, $key) { // this prepares the regex, requires PHP 5.3+ I think.
$value = '~\b' . preg_quote( $value ,'~') . '\b~i'; // \b means word boundary, like space, line-break, period, dash, and many others. Prevends "refudgee" from being matched when searching for "fudge"
});
/*print_r($bad_words);*/
$good_words = array("fudge","shoot","dang");
$good_text = preg_replace($hit_words,$good_words,$bad_text); // does all search/replace actions at once
echo '<br />' . $good_text . '<br />';
That will do all your search/replacements at once. The two arrays should contain the same number of elements, matching up searches and replace terms. It will not match parts of words, only whole words. And of course, determined cussers will find ways of getting their swearing onto your website. But it will stop lazy cussers.
I've decided to add some links to sites that obviously use programming to do a first run through removing profanity. I'll add more as I come across them. Other than yahoo:
1.) Dell.com - replace matching words with <profanity deleted>.
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/peripherals/f/3529/t/19502072.aspx
2.) Watson, the supercomputer, apparently developed a cursing problem. How do you tell the difference between cursing and slang? Apparently, it's so hard that the researchers just decided to purge it all. But they could have just used a list of curse words ( exact matching is a subset of regex, I would say) and forbidden their use. That's kind of how it works in real life, anyway.
Watson develops a profanity problem
3.) Content Compliance section of Gmail custom settings in Apps for Business:
Add expressions that describe the content you want to search for in each message
The "Expresssions" used can be of several types, including "Advanced content match", which, among other things, allows you to choose "Match type" options very similar to what you'd have in an excel filter: Starts with, Ends with, Contains, Not contains, Equals, Is Empty, all of which presumably use Regex. But wait, there's more: Matches regex, Not matches regex, Matches any word, Matches all words. So, the mighty Google implements regex filtering options for its business users. Why would it do that, when regex is supposedly so ineffective? Because it actually is effective enough. It is a simple, fast, programming solution that will only fail when people are hell-bent on circumventing it.
Besides that list, I wonder if anyone else has noticed the similarity between weeding out profanity and filtering out spam. Clearly, regex has uses in both arenas but nitpickers who learned by rote that "all regex is bad" will always downvote any answer to any question if regex is even mentioned.
Try googling "how spam filters work". You'll get results like this one that covers spam assassin:
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/cets/answers/spamblock-filter.html
Another example where I'm sure regex is used is when communicating via Amazon.com's Amazon Marketplace. You receive emails at your usual email address. So, naturally, when responding to a seller, your email program will include all kinds of sender information, like your email address, cc email addresses, and any you enter into the body. But Amazon.com strips these out "for your protection." Can I find a way around this regex? Probably, but it would take more trouble than it's worth and is therefore effective to a degree. They also keep the emails for 2 years, presumably so that a human can go over them in case of any fraud claims.
SpamAssassin also looks at the subject and body of the message for the same sort of things that a person notices when a message "looks like spam". It searches for strings like "viagra", "buy now", "lowest prices", "click here", etc. It also looks for flashy HTML such as large fonts, blinking text, bright colors, etc.
Regex is not mentioned, but I'm sure it's in use.
Use str_ireplace function that Case-insensitive version of str_replace()
$text = str_ireplace("flip","(Offensive words detected & removed!)", $text);
Use 'str_ireplace' to replace any case sensitive strings
Probable, this will help you
$text = 'contains offensive_word .... so on';
$array = array(
'offensive_word' => '****',
'offensive_word2' => '****',
'offensive_word3' => '****',
//.....
);
$text = str_ireplace(array_keys($array),array_values($array), $text);
echo $text;
You should use regex replacement and need to add the i flag to the end of your regex so it searches your text regardless of case. so..
$text = preg_replace("/xyza/i","(Offensive words detected & removed!)", $text);
str_ireplace can also be used if you don't need complex regex rules.
$text = str_ireplace("xyza","(Offensive words detected & removed!)", $text);
In fact, the latter is the preferred way as it's faster than regex manipulation. From PHP docs:
If you don't need fancy replacing rules, you should generally use this function instead of preg_replace() with the i modifier.
BUT, as the commenter pointed out, simple string/regex replacements can break your strings if the substring you're replacing appears as part of another non-offensive word. For this, you could either use word boundaries in your regexes or replace only those words that can't be part of other strings (e.g. the word xyza).
I'm trying to find a reliable solution to extract a url from a string of characters. I have a site where users answer questions and in the source box, where they enter their source of information, I allow them to enter a url. I want to extract that url and make it a hyperlink. Similar to how Yahoo Answers does it.
Does anyone know a reliable solution that can do this?
All the solutions I have found work for some URL's but not for others.
Thanks
John Gruber has spent a fair amount of time perfecting the "one regex to rule them all" for link detection. Using preg_replace() as mentioned in the other answers, using the following regex should be one of the most accurate, if not the most accurate, method for detecting a link:
(?i)\b((?:[a-z][\w-]+:(?:/{1,3}|[a-z0-9%])|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))
If you only wanted to match HTTP/HTTPS:
(?i)\b((?:https?://|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))
$string = preg_replace('/https?:\/\/[^\s"<>]+/', '$0', $string);
It only matches http/https, but that's really the only protocol you want to turn into a link. If you want others, you can change it like this:
$string = preg_replace('/(https?|ssh|ftp):\/\/[^\s"]+/', '$0', $string);
There are a lot of edge cases with urls. Like url could contain brackets or not contain protocol etc. Thats why regex is not enough.
I created a PHP library that could deal with lots of edge cases: Url highlight.
You could extract urls from string or directly highlight them.
Example:
<?php
use VStelmakh\UrlHighlight\UrlHighlight;
$urlHighlight = new UrlHighlight();
// Extract urls
$urlHighlight->getUrls("This is example http://example.com.");
// return: ['http://example.com']
// Make urls as hyperlinks
$urlHighlight->highlightUrls('Hello, http://example.com.');
// return: 'Hello, http://example.com.'
For more details see readme. For covered url cases see test.
Yahoo! Answers does a fairly good job of link identification when the link is written properly and separate from other text, but it isn't very good at separating trailing punctuation. For example The links are http://example.com/somepage.php, http://example.com/somepage2.php, and http://example.com/somepage3.php. will include commas on the first two and a period on the third.
But if that is acceptable, then patterns like this should do it:
\<http:[^ ]+\>
It looks like stackoverflow's parser is better. Is is open source?
This code is worked for me.
function makeLink($string){
/*** make sure there is an http:// on all URLs ***/
$string = preg_replace("/([^\w\/])(www\.[a-z0-9\-]+\.[a-z0-9\-]+)/i", "$1http://$2",$string);
/*** make all URLs links ***/
$string = preg_replace("/([\w]+:\/\/[\w-?&;#~=\.\/\#]+[\w\/])/i","<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"$1\">$1</a>",$string);
/*** make all emails hot links ***/
$string = preg_replace("/([\w-?&;#~=\.\/]+\#(\[?)[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.([a-zA-Z]{2,3}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?))/i","$1",$string);
return $string;
}
I'm trying to put together a plug-in for vBulletin to filter out links to filesharing sites. But, as I'm sure you often hear, I'm a newb to php let alone regexes.
Basically, I'm trying to put together a regex and use a preg_replace to find any urls that are from these domains and replace the entire link with a message that they aren't allowed. I'd want it to find the link whether it's hyperlinked, posted as plain text, or enclosed in [CODE] bb tags.
As for regex, I would need it to find URLS with the following, I think:
Starts with http or an anchor tag. I believe that the URLS in [CODE] tags could be processed the same as the plain text URLS and it's fine if the replacement ends up inside the [CODE] tag afterward.
Could contain any number of any characters before the domain/word
Has the domain somewhere in the middle
Could contain any number of any characters after the domain
Ends with a number of extentions such as (html|htm|rar|zip|001) or in a closing anchor tag.
I have a feeling that it's numbers 2 and 4 that are tripping me up (if not much more). I found a similar question on here and tried to pick apart the code a bit (even though I didn't really understand it). I now have this which I thought might work, but it doesn't:
<?php
$filterthese = array('domain1', 'domain2', 'domain3');
$replacement = 'LINKS HAVE BEEN FILTERED MESSAGE';
$regex = array('!^http+([a-z0-9-]+\.)*$filterthese+([a-z0-9-]+\.)*(html|htm|rar|zip|001)$!',
'!^<a+([a-z0-9-]+\.)*$filterthese+([a-z0-9-]+\.)*</a>$!');
$this->post['message'] = preg_replace($regex, $replacement, $this->post['message']);
?>
I have a feeling that I'm way off base here, and I admit that I don't fully understand php let alone regexes. I'm open to any suggestions on how to do this better, how to just make it work, or links to RTM (though I've read up a bit and I'm going to continue).
Thanks.
You can use parse_url on the URLs and look into the hashmap it returns. That allows you to filter for domains or even finer-grained control.
I think you can avoid the overhead of this in using the filter_var built-in function.
You may use this feature since PHP 5.2.0.
$good_url = filter_var( filter_var( $raw_url, FILTER_SANITIZE_URL), FILTER_VALIDATE_URL);
Hmm, my first guess: You put $filterthese directly inside a single-quoted string. That single quotes don't allow for variable substitution. Also, the $filterthese is an array, that should first be joined:
var $filterthese = implode("|", $filterthese);
Maybe I'm way off, because I don't know anything about vBulletin plugins and their embedded magic, but that points seem worth a check to me.
Edit: OK, on re-checking your provided source, I think the regexp line should read like this:
$regex = '!(?#
possible "a" tag [start]: )(<a[^>]+href=["\']?)?(?#
offending link: )https?://(?#
possible subdomains: )(([a-z0-9-]+\.)*\.)?(?#
domains to block: )('.implode("|", $filterthese).')(?#
possible path: )(/[^ "\'>]*)?(?#
possible "a" tag [end]: )(["\']?[^>]*>)?!';
I have an input for users where they are supposed to enter their phone number. The problem is that some people write their phone number with hyphens and spaces in them. I want to put the input trough a filter to remove such things and store only digits in my database.
I figured that I could do some str_replace() for the whitespaces and special chars.
However I think that a better approach would be to pick out just the digits instead of removing everything else. I think that I have heard the term "whitelisting" about this.
Could you please point me in the direction of solving this in PHP?
Example: I want the input "0333 452-123-4" to result in "03334521234"
Thanks!
This is a non-trivial problem because there are lots of colloquialisms and regional differences. Please refer to What is the best way for converting phone numbers into international format (E.164) using Java? It's Java but the same rules apply.
I would say that unless you need something more fully-featured, keep it simple. Create a list of valid regular expressions and check the input against each until you find a match.
If you want it really simple, simply remove non-digits:
$phone = preg_replace('![^\d]+!', '', $phone);
By the way, just picking out the digits is, by definition, the same as removing everything else. If you mean something different you may want to rephrase that.
$number = filter_var(str_replace(array("+","-"), '', $number), FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_INT);
Filter_Var removes everything but pluses and minuses, and str_replace gets rid of those.
or you could use preg_replace
$number = preg_replace('/[^0-9]/', '', $number);
You could do it two ways. Iterate through each index in the string, and run is_numeric() on it, or you could use a regular expression on the string.
On the client side I do recommand using some formating that you design when creating a form. This is good for zip or telephone fields. Take a look at this jquery plugin for a reference. It will much easy later on the server side.