How Matching Works | Profanity Kit

Detection is whole-word matching. A configured ass matches in ass!, but not inside classic or assessment:

detector.check("classic assessment"); // false
detector.check("ass!"); // true

Letters, combining marks, and numbers belong to a word. Punctuation, whitespace, apostrophes, hyphens, and underscores are boundaries. Input and dictionary entries use NFC normalization followed by lowercase casing.

findAll() scans the complete input, returns matches in source order, and keeps repeated occurrences. Match start and end are UTF-16 offsets into the original string. filter() replaces only matched spans and preserves all other text.

check() exits as soon as it finds a match; isClean() is its readable inverse. Both are closure-backed and safe as callbacks:

comments.filter(detector.isClean);

Scope

Profanity Kit is a profanity detection toolkit, not a complete content moderation system. It intentionally does not provide phrase matching, substring matching, aggressive leetspeak expansion, or contextual moderation. Create a detector with the configuration you need and apply human and product-specific moderation policy around its results.

A match is not proof that a statement is abusive: some words have ordinary meanings in other contexts. The Indonesian built-in pack omits anjing, babi, wedus, sempak, and setan for that reason, while retaining the profanity-specific form anjg. Add context-dependent terms to your own blockList when your application needs stricter detection.