I hate myself, I'm a beginner javascript programmer (actually less than that) and I've been surfing through hell and back trying to get regular expressions in my head, but it's quite a challenge.

If anybody here could help me with a particular regular expression to detect a happy face I would be eternally grateful.

yes, this: ""

I only have come up with this:

/^[:][)]$/

which is nothing really, because it only detects it at the first position in a string.

I want it to detect every happy face in a string of characters individually to replace them with and image of a real happy face gif.

Nevermind is this:

/[:][)]/g

All good times for now.