Question

I’m trying to remove certain emoticons from a string, but I can’t figure out how to match emoticons consisting of special characters and letters, for example 😀 or 😀 (it works for emoticons like “:-)” ). I tried

$message =~ s/\:D//;

and few other variations, but nothing seems to work. Where am I wrong?

EDIT: I was actually stupid and didn’t realize I made all the letters lowercase before this command, so all the emoticons were already changed to “:d”. Thanks for help.

Answer 1

You can write some unit tests:

sub assert_equals($$) {
  my ($expected, $actual) = @_;
  $expected eq $actual or die "expected <$expected>, got <$actual>\n";
}

sub no_smilies($) {
  my ($message) = @_;
  $message =~ s/:D\b//g;
  return $message;
}

sub test() {
  assert_equals("", no_smilies(":D"));
  ...
}

Then you can do the rest using trial and error.