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I'm looking into some online tutorials that I would like to use in teaching kids to program. The author of some of these tutorials enjoys bad language, based on his twitter account.

It would help me in evaluating materials if there was a tool that would quickly inform me of any vulgar words that occur in a web site. Does anyone know of such a tool?

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  • This is very good question. I dont know any tools for that. But this is insprationful, I think Google etc have to put waning signs like tv warning signs. We see results from search engine, but We have no idea its quality of language in use.
    – Digerkam
    Feb 13, 2013 at 15:34
  • I think I know the author you speak of, and if it is him, then his books are pg13(Learn ________ The Hard Way)?
    – elssar
    Mar 16, 2013 at 0:55
  • Also, you could just try and ask the author, by twitter or email, whether his books contain stuff that might not be suitable for children
    – elssar
    Mar 16, 2013 at 0:57
  • You are correct, that's the author that initiated the question. The thing is, I often find myself in the position of wanting to quickly evaluate all tutorials on a site, for recommendation for someone else's child, so I'd like to automate the process. Mar 16, 2013 at 1:27
  • Well, he claims that his books are PG13 - zedshaw.com/#/books And from what I've seen of the books(I haven't read them, just a couple of pages) they didn't seem to have any of his usual colorful language. Don't think you have anything to worry about in terms on curse words there.
    – elssar
    Mar 16, 2013 at 10:55

2 Answers 2

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If the site is available for search engines, you can use something like google to find the presence of any word in a site, put this in google:

site:webapps.stackexchange.com gmail

and it will find all occurances of gmail in site webapps.stackexchange.com

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  • 3
    Thanks, I had already done this for some specific words. I was wondering if there were a tool that would save me the trouble of thinking of and searching individually on each potentially offensive word. Feb 13, 2013 at 14:21
  • One challenge would be defining what's offensive in your culture: there are differences even among speakers of the same language. One real example, based on a hymn I've heard of: the phrase "may our lived be rooted in love" is perfectly acceptable in some cultures, but laden with inuendo in others. Feb 14, 2013 at 11:23
  • Of course. But this doesn't change the fact that tools have been built that measure offensiveness. I don't need perfection. Mar 16, 2013 at 1:29
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You might want to consider installing web filtering software, or some other program that can simply remove the offending words from any site. There are a number of Chrome and Firefox extensions that simply replace words with * * * * from a predefined list of blockable words. This way, you don't have to worry about whether a particular site uses salty language in an otherwise helpful post.

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