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
    CSS Rounded Corners

    The ability to create rounded corners with CSS opens the possibility of subtle design improvements without the need to include images.  CSS rounded corners thus save us time in creating images and requests to the server.  Today, rounded corners with CSS are supported by all of...

  • By
    Facebook Sliders With Mootools and CSS

    One of the great parts of being a developer that uses Facebook is that I can get some great ideas for progressive website enhancement. Facebook incorporates many advanced JavaScript and AJAX features: photo loads by left and right arrow, dropdown menus, modal windows, and...

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!