Match Emojis with Regular Expressions

By  on  

When experimenting with unicode property escapes, to identify accented letters in strings, it reminded me of a question I had a few years ago: what is the best way to identify and then replace emojis in a string? I first noticed this practice when using emojis in Facebook -- sometimes Facebook would replace an emoji with one of their own custom images, likely because another device may not support that emoji.

Much the way you can match accented characters, you can use unicode property escapes to match emojis:

const emojis = "😂😂💯".match(/\p{Emoji_Presentation}/gu);

// ["😂", "😂", "💯"]

I've previously seen massive arrays of every emoji ever created, and it may be possible that {Emoji_Presentation} doesn't contain all emojis across all devices, but this regex has matched every case I've come across.

Happy emoji....ing!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Add Controls to the PHP Calendar

    I showed you how to create a PHP calendar last week. The post was very popular so I wanted to follow it up with another post about how you can add controls to the calendar. After all, you don't want your...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Dotter

    It's best practice to provide an indicator of some sort when performing an AJAX request or processing that takes place in the background. Since the dawn of AJAX, we've been using colorful spinners and imagery as indicators. While I enjoy those images, I am...

Discussion

  1. Roberto

    Great stuff!

    But actually there are quite a few where Emoji_Presentation does not work. Probably most of (all?) marked here as not Emoji_Presentation https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/emoji/emoji-data.txt but Extended_Pictographic or just Emoji.

    .match(/\p{Emoji}/gu);

    work too well (matching 1-9, # and *) but

    .match(/(\p{Emoji_Presentation}|\p{Extended_Pictographic})/gu)

    seems to do the charm :)

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!