CODEWITHSUNDEEP
runicodeencoding
J L
J L

Reputation: 420

Can R transform emoji characters to their text equivalents?

In my question yesterday, "Can R read html-encoded emoji characters?", user rensa noted that:

As far as I'm aware, there's no solution to printing emoji in the R console: they always come out as "U0001f600" (or what have you). However, the packages I described above can help you plot emoji in some circumstances (I'm hoping to expand ggflags to display arbitrary full-colour emoji at some point). They can also help you search for emoji to get their codes, but they can't get names given the codes AFAIK. But maybe you could try importing the emoji list from emojilib into R and doing a join with your data frame, if you've extracted the emoji codes into a column, to get the English names.

How would this look in R?

(Note: I'm posting this question with the intention of answering it immediately, rather than posting this in the question linked above, since it's tangential to that question, but still possibly of use to others.)

Upvotes: 2

Views: 817

Answers (1)

J L
J L

Reputation: 420

The approach below works for transforming an emoji character or unicode representation into a name.

I am happy to release the code snippet below under a CC0 dedication (i.e., putting this implementation into the public domain for free reuse).

# Get (MIT-licensed) emojilib data:
emoji_json_file <- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/muan/emojilib/master/emojis.json"
json_data <- rjson::fromJSON(paste(readLines(emoji_json_file), collapse = ""))

get_name_from_emoji <- function(emoji_unicode, emoji_data = json_data){
  emoji_evaluated <- stringi::stri_unescape_unicode(emoji_unicode)

  # names(json_data)
  vector_of_emoji_names_and_characters <- unlist(
    lapply(json_data, function(x){
      x$char
    })
  )

  name_of_emoji <- attr(
    which(vector_of_emoji_names_and_characters == emoji_evaluated)[1],
    "names"
  )

  name_of_emoji
}

get_name_from_emoji("\\U0001f917")
# [1] "hugs"
get_name_from_emoji("🤗") # An attempt actually pasting the hugs emoji in also works.
# [1] "hugs"

Upvotes: 4

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