title: Identifying word strings and emoticons, trouble with punctuation
body: <p>I am going to preface this by saying I have no technical experience in programming at all so please excuse me if I am using the incorrect terminology, but am still tasked to find a solution to a problem we have.</p>
  
  <p>We have a portion of an app that is designed to identify positive and negative words and emoticons in Facebook and Twitter posts. We have developed comprehensive dictionaries for this however the code we have is not performing well.</p>
  
  <p>The problem: words that end with punctuation (e.g. amazing!) are not being identified. As it stands words are split based on white space. I don' t think we can strip punctuation entirely as this will impact on identifying the lists of emoticons.</p>
  
  <p>The solution: we hope is along these lines:
  (1) split on white space to get words
  Then, for each word:
      (i) check if they match any existing strings (e.g., “afraid”)
          (ia) if they do, go to the next word
          (ib) if they do not, remove punctuation from the tail of the word, then go back to (i).</p>
  
  <p>Is anyone able to help me with the potential syntax for this? We need to write this for iPhone and Android (c++ and java?).
  Any assistance is GREATLY appreciated!</p>