(Tested: Ruby 2.1.1, 2.0.0, 1.9.3, Rubinius, Jruby)

This is a small library to pass text emoticons like into cute smiley images your users will like. To be more accurate, this lib will parse them into <em class="smiley smiley-grin></em>, which you can style with css to show the smiley image. This way, you can use CSS sprites to make them load faster.

First, configure the smileys you want to have converted in a yml file. If you use this lib with Ruby on Rails, the default position for this file is in config/smileys.yml.

cool:
  tokens: ':cool: 8-) 8)'
cry:
  tokens: ":'( ;( :'-(" # HTML escaped, since we work in the escaped form
grin:
  tokens: ':-D :D'

You can configure multiple forms for the same smiley. In this example, :cool:, 8-) and 8) will all produce the same smiley.

Next, pass your string through smiley. If you're inside of Rails, smiley will escape html unsafe Strings and mark the result as html safe. Remember to do it yourself if you use the lib outside of Rails.

Helper:

def smileys(str)
  Smiley.new.parse(str)
end

Haml:

.post
  = smileys("Wow, they're alive :cool: :D")

The last step is to setup the CSS, so the images will be displayed.

SCSS:

.smiley { // All smileys have this class
  display: inline-block;
  width: 15px;
  height: 15px;
  background: image-url('smileys/sprite.png');
}
.smiley-cool {
  background: image-url('smileys/cool.gif'); // animated
}
.smiley-cry {
  background-position: 0 0;
}
.smiley-grin {
  width: 20px;
  background-position: 0 -15px;
}

So far, smiley has these configuration options:

# The prefix for the CSS class, e.g. smiley in smiley-grin, defaults to smiley
Smiley.each_class_prefix = 'icons'

# The CSS class that is added to all smileys, defaults to smiley
Smiley.all_class = 'emoji'

# defaults to :dashed, meaning class names like smiley-big-grin
# :camel-case will generate class names like smileyBigGrin, :snake_case like smiley_big_grin
Smiley.css_class_style = :camel_case

# YAML file with the smiley definition. Default in Rails is config/smileys.yml
# No default if not used with Rails
Smiley.smiley_file = 'data/smileys.yml'

MIT (see MIT-LICENSE)