Re: Smiley-face query

Kate Hadley (boo...@globalnet.co.uk) wrote:
: On Thu, 01 Jan 1998 22:46:45 -0600,  -@-.- (Major Major)  wrote: 
: >But I am always perplexed by one situation. That is, a smiley at the end
: >of a sentence in parenthesis. Such as this:
: >
: >(No, I don't mean Bob :))
: >
: >You, see my problem. The closing parenthesis interferes with the smiley,
: >muddling the picture. It looks as though I was trying to make an
: >open-mouth-grinning smiley, and did a poor job at it. That was not my
: >intent, of course.
: >What is the correct protocol for placing smileys in parenthesis? Thank you
: >in advance.
:
: You'll have to place the smilie outside the closing parenthesis:
: (No, I don't mean Bob) :)
: (BTW, I was sorry to hear of your Aunt's demise) :(

The above does solve the problem with the appearance of the smiley, but
otherwise leaves a lot to be desired. This way the smiley is placed in
a different part of the sentence structure than the text it references.

In fact, we have not one but two problems here:

 1. How to keep punctuation from interfering with emoticons?
 2. How to keep emoticons from interfering with punctuation?

Problem 1 is rather trivial. Any solution which places a blank on both
sides of the emoticon is adequate. As for problem 2, one needs some way
of identifying an emoticon and discarding it.

This is far from simple, and probably no completely unambiguous solution
can exist. However, a relatively simple algorithm would consider any
otherwise meaningless string of punctuation that ends in a (opening or
closing) parenthesis and begins after a blank to be an emoticon.

This would suggest that putting an emoticon before a parenthesis is OK,
as long as a space is left between them:

(No, I don't mean Bob :) )

The layout is rather 'airy', but is as unambiguous as it gets. In any
case, it'd say we can all agree on the following points:

 * Emoticons cannot close a parenthesis.
 * Double-chinned smileys are both ugly and ambiguous.

As an exercise for readers, try to devise an algorithm to identify
emoticons as well as possible. Consider for example the following
points:

 * Emoticons may use other characters than "()" as a mouth. "[]{}<>|/\&"
   and so on should be easy, but what about :-X , :-9 or :-I ?
 * What about letters in other parts of an emoticon? How would you parse
   "..about the exam (I got a B-) which we.."? How about "Bob" (a smiley
   with sunglasses, potato nose and tongue sticking out ;) )?
 * What about emoticons with (parts of) a body, such as the (in)famous
   "big girl smiley"?

--
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ltzu/ba/http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/bahttp://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/1bahttp://www.sc
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