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
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools ContextMenu Plugin

    ContextMenu is a highly customizable, compact context menu script written with CSS, XHTML, and the MooTools JavaScript framework. ContextMenu allows you to offer stylish, functional context menus on your website. The XHTML Menu Use a list of menu items with one link per item. The...

  • By
    Use Custom Missing Image Graphics Using MooTools

    Missing images on your website can make you or your business look completely amateur. Unfortunately sometimes an image gets deleted or corrupted without your knowledge. You'd agree with me that IE's default "red x" icon looks awful, so why not use your own missing image graphic? The MooTools JavaScript Note that...

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!