SgEExt — a Simple gemoji Emoji Extractor

Pronounced [sgɪksˈt]

Introduction

Let's have a talk about an usual situation.
You run a self-hosted Jekyll blog, with the jemoji plugin loaded so as to "enhance" your content with some emojis.
You'd have noticed that by default the plugin renders your static pages with <img> whose src attributes are pointing to a GitHub's (Microsoft's) location.
The latter means that a third-party is able (note that it may not be the case) to log people who consult your website, and thus is a privacy issue.

So, at this step, you may have tried to extract images to serve it yourself, but the operation is only possible from a macOS system ('cause Apple emojis are present within the system font, and... gemoji is mainly using the "Apple's emoji character palette").

Now that is said, there are your options :

Buy an Apple device
Kindly ask a friend with an Apple device to extract and send you those PNGs (cc @Naernon)
Change your underneath emojis module / plugin / whatever
~~Wait for the gemoji project to use another set of emoji~~
Download PNGs directly from GitHub, and that is definitely what this project is about !

Dependencies

python3 (>= 3.6)
python3-requests

Installation

Manually

git clone https://github.com/HorlogeSkynet/SgEExt.git

Usage

python3 sgeext.py --help

# Careful, running without any arguments would download the whole emojis palette !
# Resulting files will be set under `emoji/unicode/` (automatically created).
# Microsoft GitHub's emojis (images) will be set under `emoji/`.
python3 sgeext.py

# This directory structure will be created if it does not exist.
python3 sgeext.py -l joy -d emojis/images/

# Wanna force re-download of existing files ? Sure.
python3 sgeext.py -l joy relaxed sunglasses -d emojis/images/ -f

# Wanna save "real" emojis under their "real" name ? Sure.
python3 sgeext.py -l ok_hand -n

# Wanna download GitHub added "emojis" (mostly images) ? Sure.
python3 sgeext.py -l bow relaxed octocat trollface --verbose

# 'octocat' & 'trollface' would be ignored.
python3 sgeext.py -l bow relaxed octocat trollface --only-emojis

# Handle duplicates ('uk' and 'gb' refer to the same emoji).
python3 sgeext.py -l fr gb us jp uk jp gb it

# Wanna download the emojis currently being used in your (Jekyll) blog ? Sure.
python3 sgeext.py -l $(grep -hREo ':[a-z+-]+[a-z1-9_-]+:' /path/to/your/blog/_posts/*.md | sort | uniq | cut -d ':' -f 2) -d /path/to/your/blog/images/emojis/

How does it work ?

The script... :

... (after having tried locally) fetches the emojis database hosted on GitHub (don't click if you are on mobile)
... iterates through the elements and extracts their unicode value as hexadecimal
... uses the above result to download them from GitHub

As githubassets.com is actually a CDN, it does not look rate-limited.
Anyway, I cannot take any responsibility for any inappropriate usage of this software.

Compatibility

Although SgEExt has been developed with cross-platform constraints, it has not been tested on Windows yet.
Feedbacks are welcome, as usual.

Apple users, you don't have to go this way.