I like it

oow i didn't know that... sorry.

Please use spoiler flag next time, your posts here are visible for people who hasn't solved the kata yet in the homepage.

odd and even variables can be strings instead of lists, and use += instead of append. That will eliminate the join step at the end

This should also pass with "D:", which is the opposite of a smiley! :)

mutating the input is bad practice. the other list should have been cleared instead

You did not check the nose? How did this pass?

looks fishy :))

what if the smily face is ":8)" ?. I think you forgot to check for valid nose.

In solutions?

Spoiler flag?

Hard-coding the ASCII code for space is sloppy. Better/clearly to just use a space: if (a[i] != ' ')

Check what happens if you remove '? true : false' from return line.