gemoji

This library contains character information about native emoji, as well as image files for a few custom emoji.

Installation

Add gemoji to your Gemfile.

gem 'gemoji'

Extract images

To obtain image files as fallbacks for browsers and OS's that don't support emoji, run the gemoji extract command on macOS Sierra or later:

bundle exec gemoji extract public/images/emoji

This will extract images into filenames such as:

public/images/emoji/octocat.png
public/images/emoji/unicode/1f9c0.png (the :cheese: emoji)

Example Rails Helper

This would allow emojifying content such as: it's raining :cat:s and :dog:s!

See the Emoji cheat sheet for more examples.

module EmojiHelper
  def emojify(content)
    h(content).to_str.gsub(/:([\w+-]+):/) do |match|
      if emoji = Emoji.find_by_alias($1)
        %(<img alt="#$1" src="#{image_path("emoji/#{emoji.image_filename}")}" style="vertical-align:middle" width="20" height="20" />)
      else
        match
      end
    end.html_safe if content.present?
  end
end

Unicode mapping

Translate emoji names to unicode and vice versa.

>> Emoji.find_by_alias("cat").raw
=> "🐱"  # Don't see a cat? That's U+1F431.

>> Emoji.find_by_unicode("\u{1f431}").name
=> "cat"

Adding new emoji

You can add new emoji characters to the Emoji.all list:

emoji = Emoji.create("music") do |char|
  char.add_alias "song"
  char.add_unicode_alias "\u{266b}"
  char.add_tag "notes"
end

emoji.name #=> "music"
emoji.raw  #=> "♫"
emoji.image_filename #=> "unicode/266b.png"

# Creating custom emoji (no Unicode aliases):
emoji = Emoji.create("music") do |char|
  char.add_tag "notes"
end

emoji.custom? #=> true
emoji.image_filename #=> "music.png"

As you create new emoji, you must ensure that you also create and put the images they reference by their image_filename to your assets directory.

You can customize image_filename with:

emoji = Emoji.create("music") do |char|
  char.image_filename = "subdirectory/my_emoji.gif"
end

For existing emojis, you can edit the list of aliases or add new tags in an edit block: