Is there any way, before doing smiley substitution, of checking before hand that the wink smiley combination isn't preceded by a html special character, i.e. ("...blah..." )
where the space between ; and ) here stops it from being a wink smiley
should really end up looking like ("...blah..." ) as opposed to ("...blah..."😉
Of course, since I don't really know what code is driving the rendering of these smileys, I might be asking for something that would require tearing out and mangling the very guts of your infrastructure to fix what is just a nuisance 🙂