wemoji

Universal emoji database used by Wedgies. A near drop-in replacement for gemoji with better data, plus perfectly matched CSS display and emoji picker assets for front and back end harmony. Built off of emoji-data

We go front, we go back, we go inside-out, and then, we go front and back. For emoji.

Installation

$ npm install wemoji

Usage

var wemoji = require('wemoji')
 
wemoji.name['dragon']

Yields:

{ emoji: '🐉',
  platforms: [ 'tw', 'a', 'g' ],
  description: 'DRAGON',
  name: 'dragon',
  css: 'dragon',
  category: 'animal' }

By unicode emoji:

wemoji.unicode['🏩']

Yields:

{ emoji: '🏩',
  platforms: [ 'tw', 'a', 'g' ],
  description: 'LOVE HOTEL',
  name: 'love_hotel',
  css: 'love_hotel',
  category: 'travel' }

Fields Returned

• emoji : the utf-8 representation of the emoji
• platform : an array of platforms with images for this emoji (a is for apple, g is for google, tw is for twitter)
• description : the official unicode description in loud-case
• name : short name
• css : the css class suffix for the stylesheets, not always the same as the name
• category : the name of the category we use in our picker
• variations : if the emoji has variations, they will be included in this array as utf-8

Assets

You can install the front end assets using bower:

$ bower install wemoji-assets

If you don't like bower, you can just grab them from our git repository.

Asset Usage

Just include the emoji.css and one of wemoji-tw.css, wemoji-g.css, wemoji-a.css. Each corresponds to twitter, google, and apple depending on your choice. There is also an HTML file so you can easily preview each set.

There is now also a version of the CSS that uses external assets from the emoji-data project. The files are called wemoji-ext-tw.css, wemoji-ext-g.css, wemoji-ext-a.css respectively. You can define the image paths that the CSS points to in config.json per platform. We don't copy the images into dist for you though, so you'll need to pull them out of emoji-data yourself. For example, with the default config.json settings, and if you just want to use the twitter emoji, try something like this:

mkdir -p dist/img/emoji-tw
cp -R emoji-data/img-twitter-64/* dist/img/emoji-tw

The markup that we use with this css is:

<span class="emoji emoji-love_hotel">LOVE HOTEL</span>

You can create the proper CSS class name by prepending emoji- to the 'css' field of wemoji. If you use emoji-text, you can do that easily like this:

var emojiText = require('emoji-text')
var util = require('util')
 
emojiText.convert( str, { callback: function(emoji, data) {
  return util.format('<span class="emoji emoji-%s">%s</span>',
    data.css, data.description);
  }
})

The text inside the span ensures that the meaning of the emoji can be seen by a screen reader or text based browser. The emoji class will hide it away for graphical browsers.

Rebuilding Everything

We use emoji-data as a submodule, so make sure you check out and initial the submodule prior to trying a rebuild.

$ git clone https://github.com/wedgies/wemoji
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update
$ npm install
$ grunt build

Why?

When we decided to write emoji support into our platform we were inspired by lots of great projects such as twemoji, emojify, and emoji-data. If we put them together, we could have a complete front and back end solution. But there was one little problem - there were slight differences in each platform that made them hard to combine without a lot of little hacks. We also wanted to support a universal set of emoji that had glyphs not in github, so gemoji was out.

We looked at each and decided that emoji-data had the nicest and most complete data, so that is what we decided to start with and build out everything else we needed:

• an npm data source module to replace gemoji (we plug this data into emoji-text to accessibly convert emoji on our back end)
• CSS stylesheets with data-uri encoded images similar to those provided by emojify - a separate one for twitter, apple, and github emoji icons.
• A matched JSON data file to plug into our emoji picker