Inadvertent smiley

Filed under: Emoticons, Errors, Software
3 Comments

Just saw this in a blog entry at alternet:

One of the lawyers handling the case for the defendants (that is, defending the constitutionality of Prop. 8) sent us a note recently[....]

Presumably, the blog software is set to automatically turn "8)" into a smiley icon. Cute idea, but perhaps a little overzealous.

I've seen this sort of thing happen elsewhere, in software that turns ":)" into a smiley icon. But a colon is much less likely than an 8 to appear just before a close-paren in ordinary English text.

3 Responses to “Inadvertent smiley”

  1. jacob

    I’ve had this problem on the support forums for the Spring Framework; mixing punctuation with text in non-standard-English ways is of course quite common in code samples. I think the one that’s bitten me the most is turning “

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    • jacob

      Huh, I think the fact that my last comment included a “less than” symbol made part of it disappear. Let me try again and, you know, preview this time: I think the one that’s bitten me the most is turning “<3” into a heart.

      reply

  2. Mark Dominus

    Just three days ago a co-worker IMed me to discuss a Perl module he was working on called “MRO::Define”. The IM software replaced the “:D” with an idiotically grinning smiley face.

    Here’s a screenshot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3649769/Screenshot-RJBS.png

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