$topic =~ s/\b$_\b//g;
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The \b's tell Perl you only want the pattern to match at a 'word boundary'.

Hope this helps.

--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia

after that port, i noticed some of my words were getting drop kicked. I'll put spaces in it so you can see the word: < c e n s o r e d > thats ALL over the submitted question how much does that change?

well, i cant type it out at all, its the word censored with pointy brackets on both sides

{ $topic =~ s/(^|\W)$_($|\W)/$1$2/g; }
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update yea yea, my original code was fscked up badly .. that's what you get for looking at what edits need to be done at the same time...

that is, look for the word between either the start of the starting or a non-word character, and either the end of the string or a non-word character. You might end up with consecutive spaces in the topic this way; you may want to consider using a placeholder to indicate you removed something (something as simple as BLEEP), but that's up to your project specifications.

Says masem:

{ $topic =~ s/([^/W])$_([$/W])/$1$2/g; }

There are several errors here. You have /W where you seem to have meant \W. You have ^ inside a character class, where it means to negate the class, but you seem to have wanted it outside, so that it means beginning-of-string. You have $ inside the other character class, so you are interpolating $/ into the regex, and you seem to have wanted the $ in a place where it would mean end-of-string. I think you might have meant:

  s/(^|\W)$_(\W|$)/$1$2/g
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But the thing I suggested with \b is simpler anyway.

--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia

both of those work great and are doing exactly what I need! thanks!

my @badwords = (
                '31337',
                'hacker'
               );

my @exceptions = (
                  'perl_31337_hacker',
                 );


my $string = 'I am a 31337 hacker. A perl_31337_hacker, that is, not a
+ c_31337_hacker.';

my @occurences = ();

my ($word, $oldword, $badword);

foreach $word (@badwords)
{
    push(@occurences, $string =~ /\b\S*$word\S*\b/g);
}

my %exceptions;
@exceptions{@exceptions} = @exceptions;

foreach $word (@occurences)
{
    if ( !exists ($exceptions{$word}) )
    {
        $oldword = $word;
        
        foreach $badword ( @badwords )
        {
            $word =~ s/$badword/<censored>/g;
        }
        
        $string =~ s/$oldword/$word/;
    }             
}

print $string;
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I am a <censored> <censored>. A perl_31337_hacker, that is, not a c_<c
+ensored>_<censored>.
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