As there is often more than one way to do it, here is what I mentioned in the CB (for your reference):

12/28 at 18:19:49 <atcroft> keiusui: exit if ($input =~ m/b\W*a\W*d\W*
+w\W*o\W*r\W*d/i);, maybe? (note: untested)
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You may also want to look at Regex::Common::profanity as another possibility.

HTH.

Thank you so much for all the insight and help. I will be using atcroft's solution: m/b\W*a\W*d\W* +w\W*o\W*r\W*d/i)

Not to mention the fact that if you get too clever with your 'badword' filter, you will inevitably wind up filtering legitimate words. This is often more annoying than not having a filter at all.

Can you guess why *all* of the following lines might not pass a badword test?:

A: who reads the news?
B: if they *publish* it, flip reads it
A: flip is so well-read
B: yup, pen is too, but he's a bit cocky
A: probably cause he drives a FiretrUCK, You!
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"bad words" are everywhere, if you look hard enough. If you look too hard, you will wind up irritating the polite people, and giving the naughty potty mouths one more way to mock you, and your 'clever' filter.

Everywhere!

Insert something like (?s:.*) between each character.

Not quite. The sentence "She hid in the closet" would be flagged as a badword.

I considered that but figured that I'd rather be restrictive than permissive.

⠤⠤ ⠙⠊⠕⠞⠁⠇⠑⠧⠊

$input = "There's the b/a/d/w/o/r/d.";
(my $test = $input) =~ s/\W+//g;
if($test =~ /badword/) { 
    print "You sneaky devil!\n";
}
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Of course, that still leaves 'badw0rd' and 'b_a_d_w_o_r_d', but it is a start. I would be more restrictive:

(my $test = $input) =~ s/[^A-Z]//ig;
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This will still permit 'baaadwooord', unfortunately.

I'm inclined to agree with [id://phaylon], in that there is no substitute for moderation. :)

Update: forgot the ^ character. <blush>

Needless to say, an exact match for a bad word would be scored high, whereas a match once characters have been removed (or added - symbols are often used in place of letters) would be scored less. One might debate that a swear word creative enough to defeat all algorithms is not as damaging as a regular swear word anyhow.