Displaying iOS emoji unicode characters on the web

Question

There are a lot of applications which accept input from iOS devices, and unicode characters on those devices are fairly common. Does anyone know of any libraries or resources that would allow these unicode characters to be displayed as images on non-iOS browsers, or possibly convert them to their closest ASCII equivalents; e.g., possibly smiley-face unicode character would get converted to the ascii string ":)". Or is there possibly a cross-browser font-face which I could use that faithfully supports the unicode subset used for iOS emoji icons..

Specifically, I'd like to be able to display something like the following page faithfully cross-browser (modern browsers are fine): http://hasseg.org/stuff/ios-emoji/.

Edit: the solution would preferably be in Python if done server-side.

Answer 1

You didn't specify a language, but here's a library for PHP: http://code.iamcal.com/php/emoji/.