Find out if Character in String is emoji?

What I stumbled upon is the difference between characters, unicode scalars and glyphs.

For example, the glyph 👨‍👨‍👧‍👧 consists of 7 unicode scalars:

• Four emoji characters: 👨👩👧👧
• In between each emoji is a special character, which works like character glue; see the specs for more info

Another example, the glyph 👌🏿 consists of 2 unicode scalars:

• The regular emoji: 👌
• A skin tone modifier: 🏿

Last one, the glyph 1️⃣ contains three unicode characters:

• The digit one: 1
• The variation selector
• The Combining Enclosing Keycap:⃣

So when rendering the characters, the resulting glyphs really matter.

Swift 5.0 and above makes this process much easier and gets rid of some guesswork we needed to do. Unicode.Scalar's new Property type helps is determine what we're dealing with. However, those properties only make sense when checking the other scalars within the glyph. This is why we'll be adding some convenience methods to the Character class to help us out.

For more detail, I wrote an article explaining how this works.

For Swift 5.0, it leaves you with the following result:

extension Character {    /// A simple emoji is one scalar and presented to the user as an Emoji    var isSimpleEmoji: Bool {        guard let firstScalar = unicodeScalars.first else { return false }        return firstScalar.properties.isEmoji && firstScalar.value > 0x238C    }    /// Checks if the scalars will be merged into an emoji    var isCombinedIntoEmoji: Bool { unicodeScalars.count > 1 && unicodeScalars.first?.properties.isEmoji ?? false }    var isEmoji: Bool { isSimpleEmoji || isCombinedIntoEmoji }}extension String {    var isSingleEmoji: Bool { count == 1 && containsEmoji }    var containsEmoji: Bool { contains { $0.isEmoji } }    var containsOnlyEmoji: Bool { !isEmpty && !contains { !$0.isEmoji } }    var emojiString: String { emojis.map { String($0) }.reduce("", +) }    var emojis: [Character] { filter { $0.isEmoji } }    var emojiScalars: [UnicodeScalar] { filter { $0.isEmoji }.flatMap { $0.unicodeScalars } }}

Which will give you the following results:

"A̛͚̖".containsEmoji // false"3".containsEmoji // false"A̛͚̖▶️".unicodeScalars // [65, 795, 858, 790, 9654, 65039]"A̛͚̖▶️".emojiScalars // [9654, 65039]"3️⃣".isSingleEmoji // true"3️⃣".emojiScalars // [51, 65039, 8419]"👌🏿".isSingleEmoji // true"🙎🏼‍♂️".isSingleEmoji // true"🇹🇩".isSingleEmoji // true"⏰".isSingleEmoji // true"🌶".isSingleEmoji // true"👨‍👩‍👧‍👧".isSingleEmoji // true"🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿".isSingleEmoji // true"🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿".containsOnlyEmoji // true"👨‍👩‍👧‍👧".containsOnlyEmoji // true"Hello 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧".containsOnlyEmoji // false"Hello 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧".containsEmoji // true"👫 Héllo 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧".emojiString // "👫👨‍👩‍👧‍👧""👨‍👩‍👧‍👧".count // 1"👫 Héllœ 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧".emojiScalars // [128107, 128104, 8205, 128105, 8205, 128103, 8205, 128103]"👫 Héllœ 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧".emojis // ["👫", "👨‍👩‍👧‍👧"]"👫 Héllœ 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧".emojis.count // 2"👫👨‍👩‍👧‍👧👨‍👨‍👦".isSingleEmoji // false"👫👨‍👩‍👧‍👧👨‍👨‍👦".containsOnlyEmoji // true

For older Swift versions, check out this gist containing my old code.

The simplest, cleanest, and swiftiest way to accomplish this is to simply check the Unicode code points for each character in the string against known emoji and dingbats ranges, like so:

extension String {    var containsEmoji: Bool {        for scalar in unicodeScalars {            switch scalar.value {            case 0x1F600...0x1F64F, // Emoticons                 0x1F300...0x1F5FF, // Misc Symbols and Pictographs                 0x1F680...0x1F6FF, // Transport and Map                 0x2600...0x26FF,   // Misc symbols                 0x2700...0x27BF,   // Dingbats                 0xFE00...0xFE0F,   // Variation Selectors                 0x1F900...0x1F9FF, // Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs                 0x1F1E6...0x1F1FF: // Flags                return true            default:                continue            }        }        return false    }}

Swift 5.0

… introduced a new way of checking exactly this!

You have to break your String into its Scalars. Each Scalar has a Property value which supports the isEmoji value!

Actually you can even check if the Scalar is a Emoji modifier or more. Check out Apple's documentation: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/unicode/scalar/properties

You may want to consider checking for isEmojiPresentation instead of isEmoji, because Apple states the following for isEmoji:

This property is true for scalars that are rendered as emoji by default and also for scalars that have a non-default emoji rendering when followed by U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16. This includes some scalars that are not typically considered to be emoji.

This way actually splits up Emoji's into all the modifiers, but it is way simpler to handle. And as Swift now counts Emoji's with modifiers (e.g.: 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦, 👨🏻‍💻, 🏴) as 1 you can do all kind of stuff.

var string = "🤓 test"for scalar in string.unicodeScalars {    let isEmoji = scalar.properties.isEmoji    print("\(scalar.description) \(isEmoji)"))}// 🤓 true//   false// t false// e false// s false// t false

NSHipster points out an interesting way to get all Emoji's:

import Foundationvar emoji = CharacterSet()for codePoint in 0x0000...0x1F0000 {    guard let scalarValue = Unicode.Scalar(codePoint) else {        continue    }    // Implemented in Swift 5 (SE-0221)    // https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposals/0221-character-properties.md    if scalarValue.properties.isEmoji {        emoji.insert(scalarValue)    }}