match whole word only without regex

Question

Since i cant use preg_match (UTF8 support is somehow broken, it works locally but breaks at production) i want to find another way to match word against blacklist. Problem is, i

Answer 1

Assuming you could do some pre-processing, you could use replace all your punctuation marks with white spaces and put everything in lowercase and then either:

• Use strpos with something like so strpos(' badword ', $string) in a while loop to keep on iterating through your entire document;
• Split the string at white spaces and compare each word with a list of bad words you have.

So if you where trying the first option, it would something like so (untested pseudo code)

$documet = body of text to process . ' ' 
$document.replace('!@#$%^&*(),./...', ' ')
$document.toLowerCase()
$arr_badWords = [...]
foreach($word in badwords)
{
    $badwordIndex = strpos(' ' . $word . ' ', $document)
    while(!badWordIndex)
    {
        //
        $badwordIndex = strpos($word, $document)
    }
}

EDIT: As per @jonhopkins suggestion, adding a white space at the end should cater for the scenario where there wanted word is at the end of the document and is not proceeded by a punctuation mark.