How do I convert an UTF8 encoded emoji character to an image?

Question

I have a long vector containing emojis, something like this:

emojis <- c("😐","😥","😴","😉","😛")

and then I have their utf-8 encodings which I extracted with the help of devtools::install_github( "ThinkRstat/utf8splain") followed by library(utf8splain) like this, just for example: (not accurately represented)

emojis_enc <- c()
for(i in 1:length(emojis)){
  emojis_enc <- c(emojis_enc, utf8splain::runes(emojis[i])$rune)
}
#emojis_enc <- c("U+12345","U+67891","U+91234","U+56789","U+123A6")

Then I have made a function this:

emojiPlot <- function(photo_enc, emo_char){
  png(paste0(photo_enc, ".png"))
  plot(emo_char, rescale = T, ylim = c(-1,1), xlim = c(-1,1))
  dev.off()
}

And when I do this emojiPlot("emojis_enc[1]", emojis[1]) I just get an empty plot with x and y axis. I am pretty novice with UTF and R.

The reason why I am doing is because I am using a plugin called "imagepreview" in gephi software. And the plugin requires the nodes as photos. So my goal is to have individual emojis in .png and give them their utf encodings as the name. So when I import my data, I can just point the CSV containing the utfs to the names of the photos and pull the right emoji. And then just graph it.

I am doing this for a research project. I am open to better ways to do it.

I am in Ubuntu OS. If you use Windows, then emojis will show as their correct utf format, and won't be rendered.

Answer 1

Another solution to get to the png files of the emojis is to download them from Twitter, which accepts runes in the urls linking to the png files:

library(tidyverse)
data <- tibble(emojis = c("😐","😥","😴","😉","😛")) %>% 
  mutate(rune = map_chr(emojis, ~ utf8splain::runes(.)$rune)) %>%    # convert to runes
  mutate(rune = str_remove(rune, fixed("U+"))) %>%                   # remove leading U+
  mutate(emoji_url = paste0("https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/", # make url
                            tolower(rune), ".png"))

# download the files
map2(data$emoji_url, paste0(data$rune, ".png"), function(x, y) download.file(x, y, method = "curl"))

This will download the png files and place them in your working directory.

In base

The tidyverse code is optional, the same can be done in base:

emojis <- c("😐","😥","😴","😉","😛")
rune <- sapply(emojis, function(x) utf8splain::runes(x)$rune)
emojiurl <- paste0("https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/", tolower(rune), ".png")

for (i in seq_along(emojiurl)) {
  download.file(emojiurl[i], paste0(rune[i], ".png"), method = "curl")
}