Yap it's worth a try. Hmm ok, I started out analyzing the structure of
the smiley codes.

They consist of:

 1       1         1         1       1-2       1       <- number of
characters
[hair] - eyes - [subeyes] - [nose] - mouth - [beard]

OK. subeyes and nose are OPTIONAL. It seems only mouth has more than 1
char, but max 2. So this gives 6 positions/properties and max. 7
chars.

Here are the possible strings applying to each position:

hair    = {"o", "O", ">", "}", "]", ")"}  <-- hair optional!
eyes    = {":", ";", "8"}
subeyes = {"'", ","}                      <-- subeyes optional!
nose    = {"-"}                           <-- nose optional!
mouth   = {")", "(", "s", "S", "d", "D",
          "p", "P", "c", "C", "o", "O",
          "#", "@", "*", "$", "|",
          "))", "(("}
beard   = {"="}                           <-- beard optional!

It basically ought to ignore all UPPER and lower case for letters so
both are valid. As you can see there is almost every regex special
character involved so the resulting pattern will look awkward (at
least to me).

Other than that I might design the codes containing only exactly 1
char per position, if that would simplyfy things or make it possible
at all. It would not be a problem to introduce an optional [subnose]

...     1          1         1       1
... - [nose] - [subnose] - mouth - beard

So the minimum smiley code length is 2, max is 7.

A fictuous (length 7) example pattern recognized could be: "};'O))="

This would be a bearded ("=") winking (";") weeping ("'") devil ("}")
very happy ("))") with an (UPPERCASE) pigs nose ("O") (-> makes sense
right? ;-) ). OK, now this would qualify as a potential pattern match.
If that matched the parsed string, I would check the actual map
TreeMap<String,ImageIcon> of smiley images actually available. If an
icon was found, I knew it's time to replace the string with that
image. Sounds easy...

However I have no idea how to construct the regex for this. I probably
don't have that much time to learn from scratch, I believe "Perl's"
pattern language can do a lot of veery complicated things that might
not even narrowly touch what I need.

Maybe some "expert" here might be able to construct the pattern or at
least can direct me to the right paragraphs at

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html

Can anyone assist me please?

Help very much appreciated!

Karsten

On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:09:22 -0700, "Peter Duniho"
<NpOeStPeAdM@nnowslpianmk.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
someone who said :

Regexes are for looking for patterns.  Here you just have simple
Strings.  So regexes are overkill.

A masochist would try to encode the similar emoticons as regex
expressions.   However they would be extremely difficult to debug and
impossible to maintain.  You would have to generate the patterns with
a program that analysed your list of emoticons.

However, even if you did that, the regex mechanism does not tell you
WHICH pattern it found, so you have to redo the recognition logic once
the regex determined there was an emoticon present.

One problem to watch out for:

is ":-)-------" an emoticon?  In other words, do you parse to find the
end of emoticonny characters first and insist on a complete match?