Go Emoji Utils

A collection of useful functions for working with emoji. For example: look up the definition of a specific emoji, or search for all occurrences of emojis in a string.

Features

• Find all occurrences of emoji in a string
• Search a string for the presence specific emoji
• Look up the definition of a single emoji
• Look up the definitions for a list of emojis
• Remove all emoji from a string
• Import tool to update Emoji data from Unicode.org specs
• Find the location of and occurrences of a specific emoji in a string

Examples

Find all occurrences of emoji in a string

You can search a string for all occurrences of emoji. You will be returned an array of results specifying which emojis were found, and how many times each occurred. The Locations property comprises of an array containing the start and end locations of each occurance of the emoji within the string you're searching.

input := "This is a string 😄 🐷 with some 👍🏻 🙈 emoji! 🐷 🏃🏿‍♂️"
result := emoji.FindAll(input)

// result: SearchResults{ SearchResult{ Match: Emoji{…}, Occurrences: 1, Locations: […] }, …}

Search a string for the presence specific emoji

You can search a string for the presence of a specific emoji. You will be returned a SearchResult struct with the definition of the matching emoji, how many times it occurred in the string, and its location within the string.

input := "This is a string 😄 🐷 with some 👍🏻 🙈 emoji! 🐷 🏃🏿‍♂️"
result := emoji.Find("🐷", input)

// result: SearchResult{ Match: Emoji{ Key:"1F437", Value:"🐷", Descriptor: "pig" }, Occurrences: 2, Locations: [[19 19] [42 42]  } }

Checking search results for the occurrence of a specific emoji

The SearchResults struct has an IndexOf method for conveniently checking whether or not a specific emoji appears within the results set. If the emoji is not found a position of -1 is returned.

input := "This is a string 😄 🐷"
results := emoji.FindAll(input)

pigEmoji := emoji.Emojis["1F437"]
pigIndex := results.IndexOf(pigEmoji)
// pigIndex: 1

Look up the definition of a single emoji

You can lookup the definition of a single emoji character using the LookupEmoji function. If a matching emoji can't be found an error will be returned.

result, err := emoji.LookupEmoji("🐷")

// result: Emoji{ Key:"1F437", Value:"🐷", Descriptor: "pig" }

Look up the definitions for a list of emojis

You can lookup the definition of a for each emoji character in an array of emojis using the LookupEmojis function. This function is a convenience function that loops through the input slice and passes each emoji to the LookupEmoji function.

Results are returned in the same order that the input strings were provided in. If a matching emoji can't be found an error will be appear in for that position in the result slice.

result := emoji.LookupEmojis([]string{"🐷", "🙈"})

// result: []interface{}{ Emoji{ Key:"1F437", Value:"🐷", Descriptor: "pig" }, …}

Remove all emoji from a string

You can remove all the emoji characters from a string. This function finds all occurences of emoji using the FindAll function, and uses the Location field to remove runes at those indexes.

input := "This is a string 😄 🐷 with some 👍🏻 🙈 emoji! 🐷 🏃🏿‍♂️ 🥰"
output := emoji.RemoveAll(input)

// output: "This is a string with some emoji!"

Updating the Emoji definitions data file

Definitions of each emoji can be found in the data/emoji.json file. This JSON file is unmarshalled into a map at runtime with the emoji's hex representation as it's key. You can update the definitions file import program bundled with this package. You can find it at import/main.go. It updates emoji.json (if you want to use this), as well as emojidata.go which is compiled into the package.