Smilies with apostrophes are Smarty-ified before being parsed (like :'( )

[sethkinast]

As seen here: ​http://sethkinast.com/blog/archive/2005/02/14/happy-singles-awareness-day/#comment-2177

The function that turns straight apostrophes into forward and back apostrophes fires before the smiley parser. Smilies should be parsed first so things like the crying face :'( work.

[MC_incubus]

Are you using a custom list of smilies by setting $wpsmiliestrans in the config file?

None of WordPress's built in smilies contain apostrophes. The shortcut for the crying emoticon is :cry:

See here for a list of all of the emoticons:
​http://txfx.net/2004/08/18/wordpress-smilies/

[sethkinast]

Indeed, it's a custom list.

[MC_incubus]

Bumped priority for convert_smilies up to 9 in the patch I uploaded.

Thanks for reporting the issue, Seth.

[filosofo]

fixed at or before 2.0.3