emoji-regex offers a regular expression to match all emoji symbols and sequences (including textual representations of emoji) as per the Unicode Standard. It’s based on emoji-test-regex-pattern, which generates (at build time) the regular expression pattern based on the Unicode Standard. As a result, emoji-regex can easily be updated whenever new emoji are added to Unicode.

Via npm:

npm install emoji-regex

In Node.js:

const emojiRegex = require('emoji-regex');
// Note: because the regular expression has the global flag set, this module
// exports a function that returns the regex rather than exporting the regular
// expression itself, to make it impossible to (accidentally) mutate the
// original regular expression.

const text = `
\u{231A}: ⌚ default emoji presentation character (Emoji_Presentation)
\u{2194}\u{FE0F}: ↔️ default text presentation character rendered as emoji
\u{1F469}: 👩 emoji modifier base (Emoji_Modifier_Base)
\u{1F469}\u{1F3FF}: 👩🏿 emoji modifier base followed by a modifier
`;

const regex = emojiRegex();
for (const match of text.matchAll(regex)) {
  const emoji = match[0];
  console.log(`Matched sequence ${ emoji } — code points: ${ [...emoji].length }`);
}

Console output:

Matched sequence ⌚ — code points: 1
Matched sequence ⌚ — code points: 1
Matched sequence ↔️ — code points: 2
Matched sequence ↔️ — code points: 2
Matched sequence 👩 — code points: 1
Matched sequence 👩 — code points: 1
Matched sequence 👩🏿 — code points: 2
Matched sequence 👩🏿 — code points: 2

1. Update emoji-test-regex-pattern as described in its repository.

2. Bump the emoji-test-regex-pattern dependency to the latest version.

3. Update the Unicode data dependency in package.json by running the following commands:

   # Example: updating from Unicode v13 to Unicode v14.
   npm uninstall @unicode/unicode-13.0.0
   npm install @unicode/unicode-14.0.0 --save-dev

4. Generate the new output:

   npm run build

5. Verify that tests still pass:

   npm test

1. On the main branch, bump the emoji-regex version number in package.json:

   npm version patch -m 'Release v%s'

   Instead of patch, use minor or major as needed.

   Note that this produces a Git commit + tag.

2. Push the release commit and tag:

   git push && git push --tags

   Our CI then automatically publishes the new release to npm.

Mathias Bynens

emoji-regex is available under the MIT license.