How to display emoji char in HTML

The Unicode character U+1F60B FACE SAVOURING DELICIOUS FOOD is a so-called Plane 1 character, which means that its UTF-16 encoded form consists of two 16-bit code units, namely 0xD83D 0xDE0B. Generally, Plane 1 characters cause considerable problems because many programs are not prepared to deal with them, and few fonts contain them.

According to http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f60b/fontsupport.htm this particular character only exists in DejaVu fonts and in Symbola, but the versions of DejaVu I’m using don’t contain it.

Instead of dealing with the problems of encodings (which are not that difficult, but require extra information), you can use the character reference 😈 in HTML. But this does not solve the font problem. I don’t know about iPhone fonts, but in general in web browsing, the odds of a computer having any font capable of rendering the character are probably less than 1%. So you may need to use downloadable fonts. Using an image is obviously much simpler and mostly more reliable.

U+E056 is a Private Use codepoint, which means that anybody can make an agreement about its meaning with his brother or with himself, without asking anyone else’s mind. A font designer may assign any glyph to it.

IMPORTANT: As of this posting, the only browser that doesn't automatically support emojis is chrome.

FOR CHROME: Depending on what server side language you are using, you should be able to find a library that converts emojis for you. I recently needed to solve this issue with php and used this library:

https://github.com/iamcal/php-emoji

The creator essentially created a sprite and adjusts the css according to the unicode of the emoji. It isnt pretty, but luckily he/she did all the grunt work for you. If you're using a different language you should be able to find something similar.

how do I put those little boxes into a php file?

Same way as any other Unicode character. Just paste them and make sure you're saving the PHP file and serving the PHP page as UTF-8.

When I put it into a php file, it turns into question marks and what not

Then you have an encoding problem. Work it out with Unicode characters you can actually see properly first, for example ąαд™日本, before worrying about the emoji.

Your PHP file should be saved as UTF-8; the page it produces should be served as Content-Type: text/html;charset:UTF-8 (or with similar meta tag); the MySQL database should be using a UTF-8 collation to store data and PHP should be talking to MySQL using UTF-8.

However. Even handling everything correctly like this, PCs will still not show the emoji. That's because:

they don't have fonts that include shapes for those characters, and

emoji are still completely unstandardised. Those characters you posted are in the Unicode Private Use Area, which means they don't have any official meaning at all.

Each network in Japan uses different character codes for their emoji, mapped to different areas in the PUA. So even on another mobile phone, it probably won't display the correct character, unless you spend ages manually converting emoji codes for different networks. I'm guessing the ones you posted above are from SoftBank (iPhone?).

There is an ongoing proposal led by Google and Apple to collate the different networks' emoji and give them a proper standardised place in Unicode. Until then, getting emoji to display consistently across networks is an exercise in unhappiness. See the character overview from the standardisation work to see how much converting you would have to do.

God, I hate emoji. All that pain for such a load of useless twee rubbish.