I am working on creating a Flash based kid's game. On this game, we are allowing kids to enter a handle, 6 characters in length, to post their high scores. What we want to do is add a filter on this application so they can not enter any questionable or vulgar handles. We have done this before with 3 characters, and had client side java script checks for bad words, but 6 charaters adds about another million possibilities. Anybody come across this before? And if so, is there a software solution you would recommend?

Livescript unfortunately does not support Regular Expressions (one of the most useful features of JavaScript which was quite strangely left out). Thus a regular expression is out of the question.
You can however use the String().indexOf function to do a number of searches for expressions, but you will certainly end up filtering words that are not vulger as some vulgar words are contained within a normal word. Regular expressions would allow a set of context rules to be applied to a vulgar word such as a space before and after the word i.e. /\svulgar\s/, but once again they are out of the question.
The 2 options I think you have are:
1. Create an array of all vulgar words you can think of, and do an indexOf search for the words:
var vulgarWords = new Array ('word1', 'word2', 'word3'); // etc.
for (needle in vulgarWords) {
if (String(handle).indexOf (vulgarWords[needle]) > -1) {
// abort, vulgar word found
}
}

2. Get the code from kris and use this code Server-side. You can then use the loadVariables() function in Flash 5, and send the handle as a String to the server. The Server-side code will verify the handle variable sent as a GET/POST, and should send back a response URL encoded to the Flash movie. The flash movie can then display a message to the user that their handle is inappropriate etc.

Hope this helps.
Matt

On 23:39:54 18 June 2001 kris wrote:
>I have seen this done before for a kids football forum. A
>validation script using JavaScript was used. You need to
>write a fairly complex string parser that uses JavaScript
>Regular Expressions. The hardest thing is to list all the
>possible vulgar phases. But the character length is
>unlimited and it was fairly quick.
>
>I am not 100% familar with LiveScript the scripting
>language used by Flash 5, but it does look like a
>JavaScript hybrid. So the conversion should not be too
>difficult.
>
>However I will try and locate the source code for you
>which should make things a little easier.
>
>On 18:30:59 7 June 2001 tdrugan wrote:
>>I am working on creating a Flash based kid's game. On
>this
>>game, we are allowing kids to enter a handle, 6
>characters
>>in length, to post their high scores. What we want to
>do
>>is add a filter on this application so they can not
>enter
>>any questionable or vulgar handles. We have done this
>>before with 3 characters, and had client side java
>script
>>checks for bad words, but 6 charaters adds about
>another
>>million possibilities. Anybody come across this
>before?
>>And if so, is there a software solution you would
>>recommend?