PHP Emoji Unicode Characters

The word emoji comes from Japanese e (picture) plus moji (character). Hundreds of emoji characters were encoded in the Unicode Standard in version 6.0 released in October 2010. Unicode 12.0 contains emoji using 1,311 characters. The Unicode is the Universal Standard which describes all possible characters of all languages and a lot of symbols with one unique number for each character or symbol.

These emoji are so popular that it is really a language of its own. It is widely used in social media, comment boxes, on the website, social networking, text messages, apps and even used in books also. Because of its popularity, World Emoji Day is celebrated on 17 July every year since 2014 and deemed as a "global celebration of emoji".

Prior to PHP 7, including these emoji unicode characters was not going so well. PHP 7 introduces syntax to construct full unicode for emoji and international characters. This syntax renders any unicode characters.

PHP7 Unicode Syntax

"\u{xxxx}"

Here, the escape sequence \u is added to produce unicode characters using UTF-8 codepoint, the xxxx is the hexadecimal form and must be a double-quoted string or a heredoc.

Emoji Example

<table>
<tr>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F600}"; ?></td>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F602}"; ?></td>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F60D}"; ?></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F308}"; ?></td>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F30E}"; ?></td>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F317}"; ?></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F648}"; ?></td>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F649}"; ?></td>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F64A}"; ?></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F349}"; ?></td>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F34D}"; ?></td>
<td><?php echo "\u{1F341}"; ?></td>
</tr>
</table>

In the above example, it is very clear that including unicode characters or emoji in application is so easy. If you face a problem while displaying emoji, make sure your operating system and browser support Unicode characters. If you use Linux, you would need to install the ttf-anicent-fonts package to display emoji in your browser.

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