Match Emojis with Regular Expressions
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!
![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...
![From Webcam to Animated GIF: the Secret Behind chat.meatspac.es!]()
My team mate Edna Piranha is not only an awesome hacker; she's also a fantastic philosopher! Communication and online interactions is a subject that has kept her mind busy for a long time, and it has also resulted in a bunch of interesting experimental projects...
![Create a Twitter AJAX Button with MooTools, jQuery, or Dojo]()
There's nothing like a subtle, slick website widget that effectively uses CSS and JavaScript to enhance the user experience. Of course widgets like that take many hours to perfect, but it doesn't take long for that effort to be rewarded with above-average user retention and...
![Ana Tudor’s Favorite CodePen Demos]()
Cocoon
I love canvas, I love interactive demos and I don't think I have ever been more impressed by somebody's work than when I discovered what Tiffany Rayside has created on CodePen. So I had to start off with one of her interactive canvas pens, even though...
Great stuff!
But actually there are quite a few where
Emoji_Presentationdoes 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 :)