Emoji regex doesn't capture the variation selector after textual symbols

[rgrove]

Thanks for this excellent resource! I've found it incredibly useful. I have run into one problem though.

The emoji regex doesn't capture the \uFE0F variation selector that's used to indicate that a non-emoji character like \u2764 (heavy black heart) should be treated as an emoji. Here's a simple repro case:

const regex = require('emoji-database/regex');

'❤️'.match(regex);
// => [ '❤', index: 0, input: '❤️' ]

Here it is again with codepoint escapes instead of literal characters, in case your browser/OS combo actually renders a standalone \u2764 as a red heart (Chrome on OS X doesn't, at least):

const regex = require('emoji-database/regex');

'\u2764\uFE0F'.match(regex);
// => [ '\u2764', index: 0, input: '\u2764\uFE0F' ]

This issue seems to be present for all characters that don't have the Emoji_Presentation property (meaning that they default to a text representation rather than an emoji representation unless followed by \uFE0F).

The fix seems to be to match an optional \uFE0F at the end of the regex:

const fixedRegex = new RegExp(require('emoji-database/regex').source + '\uFE0F?');

'❤️'.match(fixedRegex);
// => [ '❤️', index: 0, input: '❤️' ]

I could see an argument for not capturing \uFE0F by default since that may not always be desirable, so I wasn't sure if this was intentional or not. If it is intentional, it might be helpful to mention this caveat (and the workaround) in the readme.

Thanks again!

[milesj]

Thanks for pointing this out!

The regex is currently built using regexgen and the literal unicode character: https://github.com/milesj/emoji-database/blob/master/src/bin/generate-regex.js#L35 And based on the attached image, it looks like the default unicode character is the text representation (like you pointed out):

Now the best way to solve this... quite tricky. I suppose the default regex pattern should match everything, including text and emoji representations. I could then add additional regex patterns that are text only, or emoji only, etc. Will have to dig a bit deeper.

[milesj]

This is fixed in the next version.

[rgrove]

Awesome! Thanks. 😄