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

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Selection Styling

    The goal of CSS is to allow styling of content and structure within a web page.  We all know that, right?  As CSS revisions arrive, we're provided more opportunity to control.  One of the little known styling option available within the browser is text selection styling.

  • By
    Using Opacity to Show Focus with jQuery

    A few days back I debuted a sweet article that made use of MooTools JavaScript and opacity to show focus on a specified element. Here's how to accomplish that feat using jQuery. The jQuery JavaScript There you have it. Opacity is a very simple but effective...

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!