I want to create a word filter, and I want to store all the words in a database somewhere, probably just some text file. I'm smart enough to get the database from a file into an array, but what I want to do is then to use that array in my regular expressions...

say I have an array of bad words, but I'll make it more simple, we have a string which contains a bad word...
$badword = "badword";

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now I want to test my string, $str, for any instinces of $badword. But I don't just want to leave it at that, I want to make sure I catch the silly little "b*a*d w&or-d" instinces. How would I check $str, for $badword with any non word characters between each character.... Basicly I want do do the following, but by using a string rather than literals....
$str =~ /(\bb\W*a\W*d\W*w\W*o\W*r\W*d\b)|badword/;

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how could I do that with an array of strings?

In reply to using a string in a regexp by Anonymous Monk

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