#1 smilies only matching at word boundary

[Alexander Schuch]

At the moment, smilies are matched unconditionally,
which results in the smily ":/" being matched in URIs
as well: "http://www.example.com/".

It would be better if smilies were only matched at word
boundaries, or at the beginning or ending of a line. As
a non-Java programmer, only RegEx come into my mind in
order to achieve this easily.

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/extra/regex/bounds.html
tells that Perl-like regular expressions are available
in Java as well, so a "\b<smily>\b" expression would
only match "real" smilies and not letters occurring
inside a longer word.

I hope this gets implemented soon, as the chat applet
is really great elsewise.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

Alternately, they could include something to recognize http:// statements as links rather than only text which would have the same effect and allow to still have smilies as part of the text.