CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsregexhelperemoji
Mark Boulder
Mark Boulder

Reputation: 14277

Rails Gemoji helper for `:)`, `;)` etc.?

So https://github.com/github/gemoji maps stuff like :cats: and :dogs: into emojis.

Example from Forem:

def forem_emojify(content)
  h(content).to_str.gsub(/:([a-z0-9\+\-_]+):/) do |match|
    if Emoji.names.include?($1)
      '<img alt="' + $1 + '" height="20" src="' + asset_path("emoji/#{$1}.png") + '" style="vertical-align:middle" width="20" />'
    else
      match
    end
  end.html_safe if content.present?
end

How does one extend this to also map stuff like :), ;) etc.?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 820

Answers (2)

bigmac
bigmac

Reputation: 717

I faced this same limitation. Ultimately wrote a parser extension for gemoji with emoticon support. See gemoji-parser.

Upvotes: 1

Max Jacobson
Max Jacobson

Reputation: 58

How about this?

def forem_emojify(content)
  h(content).to_str.gsub(':)', ':smile:').gsub(';)', ':wink:').gsub(/:([a-z0-9\+\-_]+):/) do |match|
    if Emoji.names.include?($1)
      '<img alt="' + $1 + '" height="20" src="' + asset_path("emoji/#{$1}.png") + '" style="vertical-align:middle" width="20" />'
    else
      match
    end
  end.html_safe if content.present?
end

Edit with more information:

Why can't we just use the edit_emoji and add_alias methods?

Well, we can, like this:

Emoji.edit_emoji( Emoji.find_by_alias('smile') ) do |emoji|
  emoji.add_alias(":)")
end

that totally works! Now you can do this:

emoji = Emoji.find_by_alias(":)") #=> #<Emoji::Character:smile(1f604)>
emoji.name #=> "smile"
emoji.aliases #=> ["smile", ":)"]
emoji.raw #=> 😄

but here's the problem: when you have unknown input like a comment, you have to find the aliases within the comment.

content = "I'm so happy :grinning: lol I just wanna :) but I'm :grimacing:"
emoji_pattern = /:([a-z0-9\+\-_]+):/
content.scan(emoji_pattern) #=> [["grinning"], ["grimacing"]]

you can see that when you have a string and you use that regular expression from the code sample. it only finds substrings that begin and end with a colon. You can also see that it extracts the alias from the colons, and then uses the name-without-colons to look up the emoji by alias. Our custom alias :) doesn't fit that pattern -- it begins with a colon but it doesn't end with one...

So what can you do? Sorry, but I dunno! There's a good reason GitHub suggests using a character to delimit your aliases -- it's pretty hard to find significant substrings in a big chunk of text. You can try improving the regular expression to also look for your aliases maybe?

Upvotes: 1

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