Greasemonkey Hacks

Hack #24. Convert Graphical Smileys to Text

Are you tired of little smiley icons infesting web pages and discussion forums? Convert them back to text!

I originally wrote this hack in response to a joke. Someone on the Greasemonkey mailing list announced that he had developed a user script to convert ASCII smileys such as :-) to their graphical equivalents. Someone else responded, wondering how long it would take for someone to do the reverse: convert graphical smileys back to text.

For the record, it took me about 20 minutes. Most of the time was spent researching publishing software that autogenerated graphical smileys and compiling a comprehensive list of variations.

Tip

The list of smileys in this hack was taken from http://www.phpbb.com/admin_demo/admin_smilies.htm. PHPBB is a popular application for hosting web-based discussion forums.

The Code

This user script runs on all pages. It relies on the fact that most graphical smileys are autogenerated by web publishing software, and the software puts the text equivalent of the smiley in the image's alt attribute. This means we can find images that are smileys by checking the alt attribute against a list of known values. Images that are not smileys, but just happen to have useful alternate text, will not be affected.

Save the following user script as frownies.user.js:

 // ==UserScript== // @name Frownies // @namespace http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/ // @description convert graphical smilies to text // @include * // ==/UserScript== ...