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You probably all know how some IM clients convert text smileys like “:-)” to some more or less funny graphics. The problem with these is that every client has it’s own graphics, and there are themes, so what looks like a secretly smiling face here might be laughing naughtily laughing grimace there. That’s why I prefer text smilieys…

But my girlfriend uses one of those “bad” clients, so I tried to hack around it, using funny unicode characters. My first try was to add a zero-width space character like “​” (U+200B) inside the smiley, so that it would be “:​-)” instead of “:-)”. Indeed, her client was not replacing the text with an image, but it did not know the special character, so my girlfriend saw something like “:​�-)” (It was a square, in case your font looks different). The next best try was to replace the nose with a different character. Interestingly, while using the EN-DASH “–” (U+2013) instead of the normal hyphen “-“ (U+002D), the minus character “−” (U+2212) worked, so now my girlfriend sees text smileys with a slightly longer nose − but that’s ok, after all they are from me :−). And thanks to a pidgin plugin, I can just type “:-)” and ”:−)” will be sent.