Emoji characters - how to use

Report · Oct 14, 2012

I would like to use the widely known emoji characters but had no luck to display them in my CF pages. Yes, I have previously set the pageEncoding to "UTF-8" but I am stuck.

I tried to escape them but found no clues how to do so. So here is my question for anybody how has experience with it:

How can I display emoji anyway (and store them in a database)?

Thanks in advance,

Ronald

ps: I am using CF8 for dev and CF9 for production - in case this is relevant.

Report · Oct 19, 2012

Since many folks read my entry but nobody comes up with an answer, I suspect that it either dead simple (thus not worth a note) or there is no solution at all... 😕

Ronald

Report · Oct 19, 2012

I think it's more a case that it's just not a CF issue. That's why I ignored it first time round.

CF just outputs text... provided you output it with the correct encoding, your emoji stuff will "work", provided the system on the receiving end also understand it and knows what to do with it. It's not just a matter of encoding the characters correctly on the CF end, the receiving system needs to know how to render 'em. It's not the actual little pictures that are transmitted, it's just an agreed-upon code which represents [that glyph]. The receiving system needs to have software installed to know what to do with that code.

From my reading of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji, it doesn't really have much penetration. Certainly on my PC I don't see any of the glyphs in that table, I just see squares. Because I don't have the necessary system extensions installed to interpret the character codes. If I had an older version of Windows (so like Vista or before), there is no support at all.

TBH, I suspect it's a bad idea to try to do this.

Maybe you can get hold image-versions of the glyphs, and use those instead of expecting it to work via unicode.

--

Adam

Report · Oct 19, 2012

Hello Adam,

thank you very much for the reply!

I don't like the emojis either - it's just that a client asks for it... : )

The recieving browser is no problem at my site since I successfully can see the emojis in my browser. The latest OSX U use supports this character set.

The problem is I cannot find any useful info on how to define them in my CF pages.

It seems to remain a difficult topic. : )

Ronald