Detect Smilies without spaces

I know, it's dumb, but I think it's annoying that when someone enters a smiley manually like this hi:) it will not be detected and converted by WordPress because WordPress smilies functions looks for spaces and require a space before and after the smiley replacement.

I searched but I couldn't find a helpful topic about this, does anyone have any workaround for this? Like automatically replacing smilies text with [space]:)[space] upon post/comment post so it would be detected?