General clean-up of FilterUtil

| Q             | A
| ------------- | ---
| Bug fix?      | no
| New feature?  | no
| BC breaks?    | no
| Deprecations? | no
| Tests pass?   | yes
| Fixed tickets | 
| Refs tickets  | #118
| License       | MIT
| Doc PR        | 

I've also made this ready to become a separate component for composer.