PHP Emoji Unicode Characters
The word emoji comes the 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 character.
PHP7 Unicode Syntax
"\u{xxxx}"
Here, the escape sequence \u is added to produce unicode characters using the 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 an application is very easy. If you face a problem while displaying emoji, make sure your operating system and browser support Unicode characters. If you use Linux, you will need to install the ttf-anicent-fonts package to display emoji in your browser.
Related Articles
PHP reverse a string without predefined functionPHP random quote generator
PHP convert string into an array
PHP remove HTML and PHP tags from string
Import Excel File into MySQL using PHP
PHP array length
Import Excel File into MySQL Database using PHP
PHP String Contains
PHP remove last character from string
PHP qr code generator
SQL Injection Prevention Techniques
How to display PDF file in PHP from database
Submit a form data without page refresh using PHP, Ajax and Javascript
How to read CSV file in PHP and store in MySQL
Create And Download Word Document in PHP
PHP SplFileObject Standard Library
Simple File Upload Script in PHP
Sending form data to an email using PHP
Recover forgot password using PHP and MySQL
Php file based authentication
Simple PHP File Cache
How to get current directory, filename and code line number in PHP