You could try the approach taken by an online recruitment agency that I heard about at a trade fair. They allowed their clients to upload their résumé to the web site and used a search engine to index the incoming documents. Since the web site itself was accessed via the search engine, it was relatively easy to append 'and not rude words' to the end of every query.

The search engine used in this example was big and expensive but the technique of using a search engine in this way has a couple of interesting features that may be useful to you:

• Search engines ship with filters to flatten numerous document formats into a text stream. This removes the need to do the work yourself. You can concentrate on maintaining the rude word lists.
• A good search engines should have a full search language that allows you to search for words within documents where things like word order and frequency matter.
• Most search engines use a weighting system that allows you to work out how well your search fitted the resulting documents. In your case, documents that score highly could be taken off-line until they can be moderated.
• Some search engines allow you to build stored queries that compare the documents against queries as the documents are indexed. This allows you to build and maintain large and complex sets of search queries that can be maintained and updated off-line.

Implementing a full commercial search engine that can deal with numerous data formats may be beyond the scope of your current project but similar techniques can be employed by some of the less expensive search engines. The following is a useful search engine resource - http://www.searchtools.com/index.html

A surprising resource, in terms of getting a quite comprehensive rude word list, is Viz Magazine, a funny, rude and generally irreverent UK publication aimed at students and monks of an open mind. They publish a 'profanisaurus' which contains over 4000 offensive words and phrases which you could probably buy off them. I haven't put a link to Viz so that I can't be accused of peddling smut. If my fellow monks want to read the rude words, you have to make your own choice and type Viz in to Google!

inman