Remove emoji from text

Why most tools that remove emoji from text leave debris

An emoji is often not one character. A family emoji is four separate people joined by invisible connector characters. A flag is two letters from a special alphabet that only exists to make flags. A waving hand with a skin tone is the hand plus a modifier that follows it.

A keycap can include the emoji selector VS16 and always adds a combining keycap mark. England, Scotland and Wales flags add a run of invisible tag characters after a black flag. A remover that deletes one code point at a time can therefore leave a mark, tag, joiner or skin-tone swatch behind — often looking more broken than the original emoji.

This tool uses the pinned Unicode Emoji 17.0 sequence data rather than the browser's changing regular-expression tables. It matches the longest complete sequence: a family, keycap, flag or modified hand goes as one removal, and the count reflects that. A stray skin-tone or hair component is removed but reported separately, because it is not a complete emoji on its own.

What counts as an emoji

Complete emoji sequences are removed. Plain text such as ©, ½, —, € and ° stays. Unicode also lists 207 single-code-point unqualified emoji forms without VS16. This tool keeps those forms unchanged, even when a browser draws one, such as 🌶 or 👁, as a color image.

The boundary is genuinely fuzzy in Unicode — a handful of characters have both a text presentation and an emoji presentation, and which you get depends on an invisible variation selector. Where Unicode defines an emoji-style form, the emoji selector VS16 makes it removable; the text selector VS15 keeps the text-style form unchanged.

Malformed or incomplete emoji syntax is preserved. A black flag followed by only part of a subdivision tag, or a person followed by a joiner with no valid continuation, is not guessed into a valid emoji. Preserving the whole malformed candidate avoids the invisible debris caused by deleting only its valid-looking prefix.

Where this comes up

Filenames. Emoji in filenames survive on macOS and break on several older systems, backup tools and FTP clients.

Databases and exports. A database column that is not configured for four-byte characters will reject or silently truncate emoji. This is the classic MySQL utf8 versus utf8mb4 problem, and it usually surfaces as data quietly disappearing at the first emoji in a string.

Print and formal documents. Emoji in a heading copied from a chat message rarely survives a print pipeline gracefully.

Text analysis. Word counts, readability scores and search indexing all behave more predictably with emoji stripped first.

Spacing

Removing an emoji from the middle of a sentence leaves two spaces where there was one. Those doubles are collapsed and trailing spaces at the end of each line are trimmed, so the result reads as though the emoji was never typed. An emoji at the start of a line takes the space after it along, so the line does not gain an indent, while an indent that was already there stays. The receipt lists which emoji were removed.