How to add emoji to response from Bot Framework from WebChat?

Question

I am trying to add emojis to web chat response from the bot. I have tried markdown but that doesn't seem to work. What would be the best way to include emojis in the response for a WebChat?

Answer 1

To get emoji to work, you can use Unicode emoji for web chat. If you are creating the bot in C#, it is important to note that Unicode is denoted through an escape sequence. I edited my bot in Visual Studio.

The code for the reply looks like this:

Activity reply = activity.CreateReply($"You sent {activity.Text}. \U0001F600 Your greeting status is {SentGreeting}");

In this case, the emoji I am using is within the code as: \U0001F600

\U is the escape sequence that C# will recognize, and note the three 000's that are added in place of the '+' when retrieving emoji from Unicode.org standard format.

Edit: from @mgbennet: For Nodejs, you can use the surrogates of the emoji unicode to get them to display using String.fromCharCode(0xD83D, 0xDE01)