Re: Emoticon text parser

On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:40:39 -0700 (PDT), Karsten Wutzke
<kwutzke@xxxxxx> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

how do I write a text parser that will detect many ":-)", "]:->"
strings so that they can be replaced with small icons a text
component? Can someone direct me to some classes which might be
useful? Pattern? Looks complicated... BTW there's no real pattern in
those codes as I also use custom codes for other symbols, e.g. (cig)
oder :cig:, haven't decided that yet...

Here are 5 ways to tackle your problem:

1. see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/parser.html

2. You could do it crudely but simply with a table and loop through
the table using indexOf until you find all the emoticons. Look for the
longest ones first.

3. A very fast, but hard-to-maintain technique would be to do it with
a case statement for the first char that then looks at the second char
etc.

4. The mathematically inclined might write a program to analyse the
list of emoticons and generate code for a finite state automaton. See
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/finitestate.html

5. A practical solution might be to make a list of chars that start
emoticons. Then for each char build a list of emoticons that start
with that char. Now scan for emoticon-starting chars. When you find
one, compare the look-ahead with all the candidate emoticons that
start with that letter. you could implement this as a case with if
for the emoticon-starting letters e.g.

switch ( nextChar )
{
case ':': return look.substr(0,3).equals(":-)") ||
look.substr(0,3).equals(":-(");

case '<': return look.substr(0,3).equals("<:)");
}
--

Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossary
http://mindprod.com
.

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