Question

Problem B: Clean up your potty mouth: blogging software

Online blogs and other written content generation are very popular. However, as we try different ways to allow anybody on the internet to create and share written content, we run into a problem. A lot of people on the internet have foul potty-mouths and write lots of bad words. The common solution to this is to perform some form of automatic content filtering to either remove or obscure inappropriate text on an online system.

While a lot of “bad” words (like the ones we have in the example files for this problem) are not actually that offensive (just crass) there are also many words that are authentically hurtful or offensive such as racial slurs, and other hate speech. Therefore, while our program will focus on a relatively arbitrary or silly list of words, you should keep in mind that this can be a serious issue and it is treated quite seriously in many online games and content hosting websites.

Program Behavior

Our program will process a text file one line at a time based on two lists of “inappropriate words”. The program will process the text removing words and lines that are bad and printing back to the user only the good lines of text

The first list of bad words is the banned word list. Any line of text in the text file that contains a banned word should not be shown to the user. The entire line of text should simply be removed. The second list of bad words is the bad word list. A line of text with a bad word can be printed, however each and every occurrence of the bad word needs to be “removed” by marking it with asterisks “*”.

Formally your program should: 1. prompt the user for the file of user text to read 2. Open this file, printing an error and halting if it cannot be opened. 3. For each line of text in the input file:

(a) If the line of text contains a banned word (from the banned word file) do not print this line

(b) If the line of text does not contain a banned word then it should replace every occurrence of any bad word (from the bad word file) with an appropriate number of asterisks “*”. (the number of asterisks should equal the replaced word).

8 (c) After replacing the bad words, the line can be printed back to the user.

Note, there are some obvious tasks which are not in the previous outline, notably opening the bad word list and banned word list and reading it’s contents. You can choose when and how you do this. It’s possible to write your code to read these files once and only once, storing the bad words in an array, or you can write your code to open these files many times, looping over it’s contents as needed. The choice is yours. Notes on the files:

• BadWords.txt - You can assume this file will always be named BadWords.txt (and that you do not need to ask the user for this file name). You cannot assume that the example BadWords file will be used when grading (we may swap for a different file). You cannot assume a specific length for this file, although we promise it won’t be longer than 100 words. Any word in this file should be replaced with asterisks “*” anywhere it appears in the input file.

BannedWords.txt - You can assume this file will always be named BannedWords.txt (and that you do not need to ask the user for this file name). You cannot assume that the example BannedWords file will be used when grading (we may swap for a different file). You cannot assume a specific length for this file, although we promise it won’t be longer than 100 words. Any line of text that contains these words should not be printed.

Answer 1

The screenshots of sample input file and BannedWord.txt and BadWords.txt are given at the end of the code. Refer that for understanding the code well.

import re
#reading banned words
fp1 = open("BannedWords.txt", "r")
BannedWords = []

words = fp1.readlines()
for w in words:
   BannedWords.append(w.strip('\n').lower())

fp1.close()

fp2 = open("BadWords.txt", "r")
BadWords = []
words = fp2.readlines()
for w in words:
   BadWords.append(w.strip().lower())
fp2.close()

# print("Badwords: ", BadWords)
# print("Banned words: ", BannedWords)

#reading user input
filename = input("Enter input file path")

inFile = open(filename, "r")
lines = inFile.readlines()

for line in lines:
   line = re.sub(r'[^\w\s]','',line)
   words = line.lower().strip().split()
   flag = 1
   for w in words:
       if w in BannedWords:
           flag = 0
       elif w in BadWords:
           words[words.index(w)] = "*"
   if flag == 1:
       print(' '.join(words))
   word = []

CODE:

Input To the program(input.txt)

Output of the program:

From the output you can see lines 3,4,5,6 in inputfile.txt contains bannedwords and hence is not printed

while lines 1 and 2 have badwords which are replaced with asterik.

BannedWords.txt:

BadWords.txt