New Draft: Unicode Emojis in Python

drafts/2023-05-12-unicode-emojis-in-python.md

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+---
+layout: default
+title:  Unicode Emojis in Python
+date:   2023-05-12 19:07:00 -0500
+tags:   unicode emoji python
+_preview_description: Dealing with Unicode Emojis in Python
+---
+
+While dealing with Emojis, you might notice that some emojis look like normal characters - they
+are not colored and look roughly the same on every computer, no matter the font. Others, however, are colored and look
+different
+on every phone, computer and operating system.
+
+This is because some emojis are made up of multiple characters, while others are made up of a single character.
+
+While that explanation might sound easy enough, and you could click off this article right away, the world of Unicode
+is far more complicated. This post intends to explain the basics of Unicode, and how to deal with them in Python.
+
+### Multi-Character Emojis
+
+Multi-character emoji
+
+### Extracting Emojis from Strings
+
+If the string containing emojis has the emojis embedded between 'normal' text, you'll find the `regex` module
+invaluable.
+
+> **Note**: Do not confuse the `regex` module with the `re` module. The `regex` module is a third-party module that
+> provides more advanced functionality than the standard `re` module. Install it with `pip install regex`.
+
+For example, given a string like this: `💘 I 💖 love ❣️ 💝👨‍👩‍💞✨ emojis! 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦` You'll find that traditional methods
+of splitting the string will not work as expected.
+
+- Some emojis are single character, some have 2 characters, and some have an undefined number of characters.
+- Some emojis sit directly next to eachother
+
+```python
+import regex
+
+embedded_emojis = "💘 I 💖 love ❣️ 💝👨‍👩‍💞✨ emojis! 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦"
+for match in regex.finditer(r"\X", embedded_emojis):
+    print(match.group(0), ascii(match.group(0))
+# 
+```
+
+The special `\X` matcher matches complex Graphemes and conforms to the Unicode specification. To translate, it will
+properly separate emojis for normal letters, and it won't break apart multi-character emojis.