How can I restore proper encoding of 4 byte emoji characters that have been stored in plain utf8 - like this: 😊?

Question

Is it possible to re-encode emoji 3 or 4 byte strings into emoji again?

I inherited a MySQL Innodb table with utf8_unicode_ci encoding. These emoji 4 byte strings are everywhere. Is it possible to translate them back into emoji?

First step was to modify the character set to utf8mb4. This changed all strings like � to strings like this: 😊.

But what I really want is to translate 😊 into something like . (I have no idea if 😊 is really a smiley)

Answer 1

Inspired by Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams' comment. Next python code snippet shows origin procedure Emoji to Mojibake and vice versa (repair):

print ( "\nEmoji to mojibake (origin):")
for emojiChar in ['😊','😣','👽','😎']:
    print ( emojiChar, emojiChar.encode('utf8').decode('cp1252'))

print ( "\nmojibake to Emoji (repair):")
for mojibakeString in ['😊','😣','👽','😎','🙇']:
    print ( mojibakeString, mojibakeString.encode('cp1252').decode('utf8'))

I know that the question is tagged php rather than python; let me hope that analogous php solution could be very close…

Output:

==> chcp 65001
Active code page: 65001

==> D:\test\Python\20108312.py

Emoji to mojibake (origin):
😊 😊
😣 😣
👽 👽
😎 😎

mojibake to Emoji (repair):
😊 😊
😣 😣
👽 👽
😎 😎
🙇 🙇

==>

Python version:

Python 3.5.1 (v3.5.1:37a07cee5969, Dec  6 2015, 01:54:25) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32