emoji-aware

Note: Lodash's toArray (as of 4.0.0) and split (as of 4.9.0) functions now correctly split strings that contain emoji; so if that's all you need to do then Lodash is a great fit.

Emoji-aware unicode string utilities for JavaScript.

You'll need these if you ever want to split strings that contain emoji.

If you use naive methods for this (or packages that purport to split unicode strings correctly) you'll have trouble because emoji can span multiple characters/surrogate pairs.

The longest emoji I'm aware of is specified by 4 "regular" emoji (one, a heart, with its own variation selector) with zero-width joiners in between them. That's 8 unicode characters as split by most libraries. This library will correctly split that emoji into one entry in the returned array of characters.

(But the unicode portion probably needs some more work).

emoji-aware also includes a parser combinator-based parser for emoji that you can build on top of for your own parsing needs.

API

split

Split a string but keep emoji intact.

Example

var split = require('emoji-aware').split;

var result = split('cats 😸 are the best');

result[5] === '😸';
// true

A starker example that uses Mathias Bynens' getSymbols with a composed emoji:

onlyEmoji

Returns only the emoji contained in the string.

Example

var onlyEmoji = require('emoji-aware').onlyEmoji;

onlyEmoji('testing😸');
// ['😸']

withoutEmoji

Returns only the non-emoji contained in the string.

Example

var withoutEmoji = require('emoji-aware').withoutEmoji;

withoutEmoji('testing😸');
// ['t', 'e', 's', 't', 'i', 'n', 'g']