Hi all! I'm writing a vulgarity checker for my company that uses a dictionary of regex's to check for bad words. It works great except for one problem I'm having.

This is used for a message board that has a lot of sports related discussions. Some of you may be familiar with the South Carolina Gamecocks, and that's creating a problem in my engine for statements like "I'm a Game Cock fan". The engine basically does this: 

study($input);
foreach my $word (keys %$vulgar_list) {
    $regex = $vulgar_list->{$word}->{regex};
    if ($input =~ m/$regex/) {
        $foundvulgar = $word;
        last;
    }
}

[download]

Pardon the profanity here :) What I need is a check for /cocks?/ as long as it isn't preceeded by (a|the|game). Since perl doesn't have a "look behind", and there's no way to do !(a|the|game) within the regex, I'm stumped! I experimented with things like /(?!a|the|game)\s*cock/ but negative lookahead doesn't work that way.

I'm trying to figure out a way to do this in one or two regex's without having a special case in the code for this word (keeping in mind that I have to use a positive regex test with =~).

Any suggestions (even if it has to be multiple regex's) ??

Thanks guys. -Darin

In reply to Regex solution needed by spivey3587

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