: > him*! ...
should probably treat the asterisk as a close. Handling this right
depends on knowing about alphanumerics and punctuation and how they
work in various character sets.
Evan,
Slippery-slope warning....
To make the above work, you are going to need to know both character
set and language. This one _might_ be ok, but the majority of these
sorts of decisions are dependent on style rules that are
language-specific (rather than just character-set-specific) and may even
differ between two countries that use what is putatively the same
language.
john