emoji-regex

emoji-regex offers a regular expression to match all emoji symbols (including textual representations of emoji) as per the Unicode Standard.

This repository contains a script that generates this regular expression based on the data from Unicode v12. Because of this, the regular expression can easily be updated whenever new emoji are added to the Unicode standard.

Installation

Via npm:

npm install emoji-regex

In Node.js:

const emojiRegex = require('emoji-regex');
// Note: because the regular expression has the global flag set, this module
// exports a function that returns the regex rather than exporting the regular
// expression itself, to make it impossible to (accidentally) mutate the
// original regular expression.

const text = `
\u{231A}: ⌚ default emoji presentation character (Emoji_Presentation)
\u{2194}\u{FE0F}: ↔️ default text presentation character rendered as emoji
\u{1F469}: 👩 emoji modifier base (Emoji_Modifier_Base)
\u{1F469}\u{1F3FF}: 👩🏿 emoji modifier base followed by a modifier
`;

const regex = emojiRegex();
let match;
while (match = regex.exec(text)) {
  const emoji = match[0];
  console.log(`Matched sequence ${ emoji } — code points: ${ [...emoji].length }`);
}

Console output:

Matched sequence ⌚ — code points: 1
Matched sequence ⌚ — code points: 1
Matched sequence ↔️ — code points: 2
Matched sequence ↔️ — code points: 2
Matched sequence 👩 — code points: 1
Matched sequence 👩 — code points: 1
Matched sequence 👩🏿 — code points: 2
Matched sequence 👩🏿 — code points: 2

To match emoji in their textual representation as well (i.e. emoji that are not Emoji_Presentation symbols and that aren’t forced to render as emoji by a variation selector), require the other regex:

const emojiRegex = require('emoji-regex/text.js');

Additionally, in environments which support ES2015 Unicode escapes, you may require ES2015-style versions of the regexes:

const emojiRegex = require('emoji-regex/es2015/index.js');
const emojiRegexText = require('emoji-regex/es2015/text.js');

Author

Mathias Bynens

License

emoji-regex is available under the MIT license.