How can I split the string containing emoji into an array?

Question

(You will need Firefox or Safari to see emoji in code.)

I want to take the line of emoji and do something with individual characters.

In JavaScript, "😴😄😃⛔🎠🚓🚇".length == 13 , because "⛔" length is 1, the rest is 2. Therefore, we cannot do

 s = string.split(""); c = []; c[0] = s[0]+s[1]; 

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Here is what I did:

Answer 1

Edit: see Orlin Georgiev answer for the correct solution in the library: https://github.com/orling/grapheme-splitter

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Thanks to this answer, I created a function that takes a string and returns an emoji array:

 var emojiStringToArray = function (str) { split = str.split(/([\uD800-\uDBFF][\uDC00-\uDFFF])/); arr = []; for (var i=0; i<split.length; i++) { char = split[i] if (char !== "") { arr.push(char); } } return arr; }; 

So,

 emojiStringToArray("😴😄😃⛔🎠🚓🚇") // => Array [ "😴", "😄", "😃", "⛔", "🎠", "🚓", "🚇" ] 

Answer 2

JavaScript ES6 has a solution! For real separation:

 [..."😴😄😃⛔🎠🚓🚇"] // ["😴", "😄", "😃", "⛔", "🎠", "🚓", "🚇"] 

Yay Except for the fact that when you run this through your transporter, it may not work (see @brainkim Comment). It only works on initial launch in a browser compatible with ES6. Fortunately, this applies to most browsers (Safari, Chrome, FF), but if you are looking for high browser compatibility, this is not the solution for you.

Answer 3

The splitter graph library that does just that is fully compatible even with older browsers and works not only with emojis, but also with all exotic characters: https://github.com/orling/grapheme-splitter You will probably miss the extreme cases in any home brew solution. It is actually based on the Unicode UAX-29 standard