C# – Masking words in a text

Imagine you are the owner of a web site with a lot of comments (not like this one, where noone comments due to the fact that he should do it with his Facebook account 🙂 ). In this site there are people, who probably would love to share with you their opinion about the last derby match between <put any football derby here>. The point is that there are probably some words that you would like to avoid. What you can do, is to create a program, masking these words for you. Something like the following:

What have I done? I have hardcoded the input, in order to save place. Then for each word in the list of the “forbidden” words (in my case they are quite trivial and normal), I run a foreach loop, generating a string sPattern, with the size of the forbidden word and changing it, if it is present.

Enjoy the code 🙂 :

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

class MAskOutWords
{
    static void Main()
    {
        string sPattern = "";
        string sInitial = "Vitosh is my name, football is my favourite game.\nWhat is your name? \nHow do you do? Are you from Sofia or from Berlin? Lalla - lala.";
        string sResult = sInitial;
        List<string> lToChange = new List<string>(new string[] { "my", "game", "is", "do", "Berlin", "Gotheborg", "JustSomethingNotAvailable", "lala" });

        foreach (string item in lToChange)
        {
            sPattern = new string('*', item.Length);
            sResult = Regex.Replace(sInitial, item, sPattern);
            sInitial = sResult;
        }

        Console.WriteLine(sResult);

    }
}

🙂