Smileys are great way of expressing emotions with images/icons. You cant think of chatting with your friends without smileys. Am I right?
It’s been over 27 years when text smiley introduced also it’s been so long when smileys came out from IMs (Yahoo Messenger, Windows Messenger, etc) to comments on websites, blog posts. People use them to express the right amount of emotions and feelings they feel. You can see hundreds different smileys which helps people to show exact match of their expressions.
If you are using any of IMs available today, then I am sure you are aware of how you write a smiley in chat window. you just type the code like : ) and it converts into smiley like this 
Similarly, you use different smiley codes to show different smiley emotion icon. This article will help you to use the similar feature in your own web projects, commenting systems, blog posts, etc.
So ready to add smileys support into your web application, blog or any other PHP project? Lets follow the article below.
Step 1: Intro, get ready
First of all you need the images(icons) of smileys you would like to use. I prefer to use 16×16 sized images. There are many icon libraries freely available on internet. I am sharing few of them with you:
Step 2: The function
Create a function in PHP, which will parse the smileys code into its equivalent smiley image.
/*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
@Function : addSmilies()
@Params : 1. $text: Text to render.
@Description : This functions replaces the basic smiley equavalent codes
into smilies and returns back the html code after adding smilies
images
@Returns : Returns the converted html string.
NOTE : Make sure you provide the image path correctly. Use absolute or relative
paths, whatever suits to your script.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
function addSmilies($text) {
//codes and its relevant smiley image path
$codesToConvert = array(
':)' => '
',
':-)' => '',
':D' => '
',
':d' => '',
';)' => '
',
':P' => '
',
':-P' => '',
':-p' => '',
':p' => '',
':(' => '
',
':o' => '
',
':O' => '',
':0' => '',
':|' => '
',
':-|' => ''
);
//Replaces smilies codes / add smilies images: IMG html tags and return rendered text
return (strtr($text, $codesToConvert));
}//END addSmilies()
Step 3: Usage
Lets see how to use the above function in PHP code to actually parse the smileys code.
$comment = 'This is the example comment with few smilies code we use normally. Like these:
:p :O
. Its funny and cute. Isnt it?
I have created a full example script and live demo for you. See links below:
very intersting article,
Awesome, this is very easy to use in our php script .Thanks Sach !!
Much awaited article from Sachin. Really thanks a ton for your support
Really thanks to u for this kind of intersting article
no comment
cool, I must try this, thanks
Hey huge thanks for this. Was looking for this exact solution for a few days now that was well commented.
Thankyou for sharing
Thanks for appreciating my work
Its really cool dude.. thanks…
how to use this smiles in text box
thank you sachin for this php function, it's realy easy to implement and add new emoticons.
not able to… can u plz tell how to use the php file?
not able to do it…HELP!
<img src="http://paants.com/imhotter/inc/emotes2/smile.gif" width="18px">
this is really good
Thank you very much for your guidance. I reffered number of sites. But as a beginner I couldn’t find any simple and understandable guidance like this.
Thanks again
That’s great!
Thanks