Emoji Metadata

The best source of truth for emoji is the Unicode.org text file.

The data is obtained via the update script (updata-from-source.mjs).

Changes from v1.0

Instead of main being set to emoji-metadata.json it is now set to the lighter-weight emoji.js.

Only fully-qualified emoji are included.

Four versions of the data are provided (and it should be easy to add more):

emoji.js

This is a simple array of emoji provided as an ES6 module.

Usage:

import emoji from 'emoji-metadata'

The data looks like this:

export default [
  {
    category: "Smileys & Emotion",
    subcategory: "face-smiling",
    chars: "😀",
    name: "grinning face"
  },
  {
    category: "Smileys & Emotion",
    subcategory: "face-smiling",
    chars: "😃",
    name: "grinning face with big eyes"
  },
  ...
]

emoji-groups.json

This is a hierarchical structure of groups and subgroups.

It looks like this:

[
  {
    "name": "Smileys & Emotion",
    "subGroups": [
      {
        "name": "face-smiling",
        "emoji": [
          {
            "codes": [
              "U+1F600"
            ],
            "chars": "😀",
            "name": "grinning face"
          },
          ...
        ]
      },
      ...
    ],
  },
  ...
]

emoji-metadata.json

This is the same data as emoji-groups, but flattened.

It looks like this:

[
  {
    "category": "Smileys & Emotion",
    "subcategory": "face-smiling",
    "codes": [
      "U+1F600"
    ],
    "chars": "😀",
    "name": "grinning face"
  },
  {
    "category": "Smileys & Emotion",
    "subcategory": "face-smiling",
    "codes": [
      "U+1F603"
    ],
    "chars": "😃",
    "name": "grinning face with big eyes"
  },
  ...
]

The javascript version is obviously the most convenient to use. The hierarchical version is the most efficient (unless you don't want the codes), while emoji-metadata strikes a happy medium (and with on-the-fly compression is probably hardly larger than the hierarchical version).

Finally, the version of the unicode data is stored in emoji-version.json in case that's helpful.