Ask HN: How to design private messaging emoticons?

5 points·shergill··7 comments

I have a social networking site that I have coded myself. I have an option there for members to send comments back and forth to each other. I want to enable 'emoticons'; but I am not sure how to do that.. Do I just put some 'special tags' in the comment and then decode while displaying? can someone offer any input on this?

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First off, I heavily advise against emoticons. People are usually perfectly happy with plain-text ones, and some people are avidly against graphical ones. Plus, if you have many triggers for emoticons that aren't immediately obvious, people can become confused when an icon pops up where they weren't expecting one.

That said, implementing said emoticons is a simple task. Assign a list of emoticon codes and image files (eg. ":)" => "smile.gif" and ":D" => "grin.gif") either hardcoded or in a database table depending on your needs, and use a simple search-and-replace function to replace the emoticon code with an image tag of the file. Make sure this is done when the message's body is parsed, and NOT before it gets inserted into the database.

sorry but completely wrong: We (geeks on Hacker News) don't like emoticons, the users out there love them

Actually I think SomethingAwful's emoticons are awesome, and that place is full of geeks.

SomethingAwful is full of geeks in the archaic meaning.

http://www.christian-seiler.de/projekte/php/bbcode/index_en....

look into bbcode or the way msn, yahoo, aim, gmail chat etc. turn character combinations into "emoticons". Depending on your language of choice you will then do a string replace on the character combos for the image it relates to when you display that text.

Thanks guys. I ended up doing a 'string replace' when displaying the msg content.

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