How to extract all the emojis from text?

Question

Consider the following list:

a_list = ['🤔 🙈 me así, bla es se 😌 ds 💕👭👙']

How can I extract in a new list all the emojis inside a_list?:

new_lis = ['🤔 🙈 😌 💕 👭 👙']

I tried to use regex, but I do not have all the possible emojis encodings.

Answer 1

You can use the emoji library. You can check if a single codepoint is an emoji codepoint by checking if it is contained in emoji.UNICODE_EMOJI.

import emoji

def extract_emojis(s):
  return ''.join(c for c in s if c in emoji.UNICODE_EMOJI['en'])

Answer 2

I think it's important to point out that the previous answers won't work with emojis like 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 , because it consists of 4 emojis, and using ... in emoji.UNICODE_EMOJI will return 4 different emojis. Same for emojis with skin color like 🙅🏽.

My solution

Include the emoji and regex modules. The regex module supports recognizing grapheme clusters (sequences of Unicode codepoints rendered as a single character), so we can count emojis like 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦

import emoji
import regex

def split_count(text):

    emoji_list = []
    data = regex.findall(r'\X', text)
    for word in data:
        if any(char in emoji.UNICODE_EMOJI['en'] for char in word):
            emoji_list.append(word)
    
    return emoji_list

Testing

with more emojis with skin color:

line = ["🤔 🙈 me así, se 😌 ds 💕👭👙 hello 👩🏾‍🎓 emoji hello 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 how are 😊 you today🙅🏽🙅🏽"]

counter = split_count(line[0])
print(' '.join(emoji for emoji in counter))

output:

🤔 🙈 😌 💕 👭 👙 👩🏾‍🎓 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 😊 🙅🏽 🙅🏽

Include flags

If you want to include flags, like 🇵🇰 the Unicode range would be from 🇦 to 🇿, so add:

flags = regex.findall(u'[\U0001F1E6-\U0001F1FF]', text) 

to the function above, and return emoji_list + flags.

See this answer to "A python regex that matches the regional indicator character class" for more information about the flags.

For newer emoji versions

to work with emoji >= v1.2.0 you have to add a language specifier (e.g. en as in above code):

emoji.UNICODE_EMOJI['en']