Regex on ;) smilie

A minor inconvenience my users have found is that if they use a smilie such as >_> at the end of parentheses (kind of like this: >_>) then during processing it is run through htmlspecialchars(), making it >_>) - you can see the problem, I think. The ;)开发者_运维百科 at the end is then replaced by the "Wink" smilie.

Can anyone give me a regex that will replace ;) with the smilie, but only if the ; is not the end of an HTML entity? (I'm sure it would involve a lookbehind but I can't seem to understand how to use them >_>)

Thank you!

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Handling smileys like ;) is always a bit tricky - the way I would do it is transform it to the "canonical" :wink: before encoding HTML entities, and then changing only canonical-form :{smileyname}: smileys afterwards.

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Like this: (?<!&[a-zA-Z0-9]+);\)

The (?>!...) is a zero-width assertion that will only allow the following construct to match text that isn't preceded by the ....

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You should probably handle it along these lines, which sidesteps the issue of replacing replacements entirely:

• Break the string apart wherever a smilie occurs, convert the smilies into tokens
• HTML escape all the text nodes
• Convert all the smilie tokens into their HTML tag equivalents
• Glue everything back together

That's a bit non-trivial though. :)

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Find: (&#?[a-z0-9]+;)\)
Replace: $0)

We're looking for:

Match the regular expression below and capture its match into backreference number 1 «(&#?[a-z0-9]+;)»
   Match the character “&” literally «&»
   Match the character “#” literally «#?»
      Between zero and one times, as many times as possible, giving back as needed (greedy) «?»
   Match a single character present in the list below «[a-z0-9]+»
      Between one and unlimited times, as many times as possible, giving back as needed (greedy) «+»
      A character in the range between “a” and “z” «a-z»
      A character in the range between “0” and “9” «0-9»
   Match the character “;” literally «;»
Match the character “)” literally «\)»


Created with RegexBuddy

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well if your intrested in a regex solution try this maybe

(?!t)([A-Za-z0-9]| );)

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If it's in php (preg_replace you said ?), you can use preg_replace_callback :

preg_replace_callback('#(&[a-z0-9]+)?;\)#i', 'myFunction', 'myText');

in the "myFunction" function, you just have to check if you got some html entity in the capturing bracket.

function myFunction($matches) {
    if(!empty($matches[1]) {
        return $matches[0];
    }
    return '[Smilie]';
}