Censor words should support sentence level censoring for Chinese

zogstrip · February 16, 2026, 2:45pm

We should have proper “word boundaries” handling for Chinese now thanks to

github.com/discourse/discourse

FIX: support CJK and spaceless scripts in watched word boundaries (#37844)

main ← fix/watched-words-cjk-boundaries

merged 05:04PM - 16 Feb 26 UTC

ZogStriP

+84 -9

Watched words failed to match in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and other space…less scripts because word boundary detection relied on whitespace or non-word characters. Languages like Chinese don't use spaces between words, so "测试" inside "这是一个测试文本" was never matched. Introduce a SPACELESS_SCRIPTS constant covering Han, Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul, Thai, Lao, Myanmar, Khmer, and Tibetan Unicode ranges. Update `match_word_regexp` for both Ruby and JS engines so that characters from these scripts are treated as word boundaries. This allows a CJK watched word to match when surrounded by other CJK characters, and a Latin watched word to match when adjacent to CJK text (e.g., "Test" in "我的Test很好"), while still preventing partial Latin matches (e.g., "Testing" does not match "Test"). Also fix the admin watched word testing modal to use `RegExp.exec()` with capture group extraction instead of `String.match()`, since the new boundary patterns include a leading consuming group. Remove the outdated "non-chrome browsers do not support lookbehind" comment — all major browsers have supported lookbehind since 2023. https://meta.discourse.org/t/71288 https://meta.discourse.org/t/396109

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Censored pattern Bug	8	2243	January 12, 2018
* wildcards in Watched Words (Censor) don't work Feature	20	3178	January 11, 2018
Hope Watched words adds support for non-English characters Bug	2	47	February 20, 2026
A closing round bracket breaks word censoring Bug	5	1443	September 13, 2017

Censor words should support sentence level censoring for Chinese

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