As designed Surrounding some smileys with parentheses breaks the smiley

Really, it's just ambiguous. However, it's parsed left to right, so it finds the first smiley (: which sets up the rest of how it parses.
 
Just posting here because I ran into this issue and searched for "emoticon parentheses" and didn't immediately find this thread. This post ought to fix that for others in the future.
 
Top Bottom