Question

I am inserting smileys into strings. I have encoded the smileys in a certain format and when before I display the string in a component I need to replace all occurrences of the smiley codes with HTML img tags so they will show up as images. So here is the format of my smileys –

&:) ==> smile

&:O ==> shocked

&:( ==> sad

etc...

So say I have the following string –

Did you hear the news &:O. I won a million dollars!! &:)

I need to find, and then replace all the smiley codes with HTML like

<img src='file:C:/images/sad.png'/>

Answer 1

define this somewhere:

static HashMap<String, String> smileys = new HashMap<String, String>();

then fill it with the smileys (String) and their html representation:

smileys.put("&:)", "<img src='file:C:/images/sad.png'/>");
smileys.put("&:O", "<img src='file:C:/images/sad.png'/>");
smileys.put("&:(", "<img src='file:C:/images/sad.png'/>");

replacing smileys is done by replacing every occurrence of a smiley code by its html representation, just loop the hashmap like this:

public String replaceSmileys(String text){
    for(Entry<String, String> smiley : smileys.entrySet())
        text = text.replaceAll(smiley.getKey(), smiley.getValue());
    return text;
}