How can I identify an emoji in scala?

Question

I am processing tweets from the Twitter Api, and a lot of the tweets have emojis. I'm trying to keep track of the most used emojis, but I'm having trouble actually identifying them.

I'm using: https://github.com/iamcal/emoji-data to identify emojis.

I have no idea how to figure out if a string contains an emoji or not. I have tried using regex with the emoji-data 'unified' field, I have tried just checking if the string contains that field. I'm really just not sure how to check for emojis.. Any help would be appreciated.

val pattern = new Regex("(${a.unified})")
(pattern findAllIn text).mkString(",")

This is what I have tried using regex. This doesn't find any emojis. I have also tried adding a \u before the unified fields from the emoji-data, but that doesn't help.

Answer 1

You can use the following Regex to find emoji characters (and other characters outside the Unicode lingual plane):

[^\u0000-\uFFFF]

For example, we use the following code to filter out emojis from strings:

"some string".replaceAll("[^\u0000-\uFFFF]", "");

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

Your code is close to working. To extract the emojis from text try:

"""\p{block=Emoticons}""".r.findAllIn(text).mkString

For example:

scala> val text = "Use regex and now you have two problems 😂 😆"
scala> """\p{block=Emoticons}""".r.findAllIn(text).mkString
res0: String = 😂😆