prof4nities

A small Python library to detect and optionally censor profane or inappropriate words using language-specific wordlists, Levenshtein distance, and fuzzy string matching.

Installation

To install using pip, run:

pip install prof4nities

Quick example

from prof4nities import Censor

censor = Censor(language="en")

# assuming "badword" is in the wordlist
print(censor("badword in a sentence"))
# >>> ******* in a sentence

print(censor(["badword", "in", "a", "sentence"]))
# >>> ******* in a sentence

print(censor(["badword", "in", "a", "sentence"], stringify=False))
# >>> [Word('badword'), Word('in'), Word('a'), Word('sentence')]

The Censor class loads a language-specific Wordlist (default en) and exposes a callable interface. See prof4nities/filter.py for implementation details.

Configuration via environment variables

prof4nities reads a couple of runtime thresholds from environment variables (defined in prof4nities/config.py). Export them before running your code to change behavior:

export LEVENSHTEIN_THRESHOLD=0.75
export FUZZY_RATIO_THRESHOLD=0.85
# then run your script or REPL
python -c "from prof4nities import Censor; print(Censor('en')('badword'))"

Defaults are:

• LEVENSHTEIN_THRESHOLD=0.8
• FUZZY_RATIO_THRESHOLD=0.8

Persistent cache

Two kinds of persisted data are used by the library to avoid repeated downloads:

• WordNet corpora: Censor downloads the NLTK WordNet corpus on first use and stores it in the platform cache directory returned by prof4nities.config.Directories.CACHE_DIR.
• Wordlists: fetched profanity wordlists are cached under the same application cache in the wordlists/ subdirectory (e.g. <cache_dir>/wordlists/en.txt). The Wordlist manager will use a cached copy when present and otherwise fetch from the upstream source and write a best-effort cache copy.

The exact cache location depends on the platform (see the platformdirs package). To inspect or override the cache location at runtime you can set the typical platform environment variables (for example on Linux set XDG_CACHE_HOME) or read the path via the prof4nities.config.Directories.CACHE_DIR value in code.

Development

Setting up

Install uv using pip.

pip install uv

Other installation methods are documented here.

Structure

prof4nities/
├── censor.py          # Core Censor behavior and docstring examples
├── config.py          # Environment-driven settings
└── manager/
    └── wordlist.py    # Wordlist fetching and processing

Testing

Pytest is used for testing. To run unit tests, run:

uv run pytest tests/

To make your own test, make a file prefixed with test_ and put it inside the tests/ directory and should be arranged accordingly.

Then within the file simply import the functionality to test

import pytest

from prof4nities import Censor


# Test cases should be prefixed with `test_`
def test_censor():
    ...
    assert True is True
    ...