Emoticons in guestbook

[BIOSTALL]

Hey,

I have just created a guestbook and all is working well. Now i've got that sorted, i'm looking to spruce it up a bit. Wot i want to do is add emoticon (if u hadnt guessed by the title). The bit i am having trouble with is understanding this: When someone clicks an emoticon it will be added to the textbox, when they click submit tho, how will i transfer that image into a string (eg. a happy face into colon-closebracket etc etc)??

Also, How would i then convert the string into an image when read from the guestbook database?

Hope u understand, if not, just ask. Thanks for your time people.

BIOSTALL

[rpanning]

When using smilies, a user enters certain character into the textbox. Ex 🙂

Then PHP would search the textbox entry for those characters. If it finds them it replaces it with a <img> tag. Ex preg_replace("/\s(:))\s/i", '<img src="smilies/smile.gif">', $textbox);

There's more to it than that. Most people, like PHP builder, have a list of their smilies. And when a user clicks on one JavaScript inserts the characters into the textbox. And, replaceing the characters with <img> tags is normaly done during output. That way if a user edits their message they see the characters, not an <img> tag.