React Native Emoji Input

A performant, customizable keyboard input for React Native. Built for and used in Opico.

Installation

npm install --save react-native-emoji-input

or

yarn add react-native-emoji-input

If you make changes to the emoji synonyms files, you need to recompile the data sources. To compile the emoji dataset, run:

npx babel-node scripts/compile.js

Default Props

Optional Props

* When the search function yields this function is called. Additionally when the user clears the query box this function is called with the previous longest query since the last time the query box was empty. By default the function is called with one parameter, a string representing the query. If the verbose logging function parameter is set to true the function is called with a second parameter that is a string specifying why the function was called (either 'emptySearchResult' or 'longestPreviousQuery').

Usage

<EmojiInput
	onEmojiSelected={(emoji) => {console.log(emoji)}}
	/>

Compile emoji-data from source

The project is using iamcal/emoji-data. We only use the emoji.json that contains all the Unicode characters, short names, keywords, and categories. To embrace the latest version of Emoji, we suggest to compile the json file from source.

# You need first check out the `emoji-data` repo. We will use the compile tool provided in the repo.
git clone https://github.com/iamcal/emoji-data.git
cd emoji-data/build

# Pull data from Unicode standard
sh download_spec_files.sh

# Add new shortnames. Here're some examples in current dir, check out data_emoji_names.txt, data_emoji_names_v4.txt
vim data_emoji_names_vxx.txt # xx should be version of emoji, e.g. 11

# Compile from spec files into json
php build_map.php

Then copy the emoji-data/emoji.json to src/emoji-data/emoji-data.json and make sure the entry point is point to this json file.

// src/emoji-data/index.js
import emoji from './emoji-data.json';

Finally compile the data file that used in the keyboard.

node-babel ./scripts/compile.js

Missing Emojis on some devices

So why Emojis are displayed as X / other characters insetad of actual Emojis for some of your users?
That is because this library renders Emojis based on Font and Font need to support Emoji character in order to render it. And those fonts are updated with every system release, but because there is a lot of Android device manufacturers who are actually using Android as a base to come up with their own UI layer then it is harder for them to keep up with system updates.
You can read more about it here Emojipedia article link

So what can you do?
Apps such as Slack / WhatsApp are actually providing Emojis as little images so that they can be render regardless of operating system on mobile phone. The problem in React-Native is that there is no support for placing images in Input element at time of writing this.
Other solution is to limit number of possible emojis to most basic ones which are supported on most devices. Choosing emojis from Unicode 6.0 seems like solid solution: Unicode 6.0 Emojis List - you get tons of Emojis that are most likely to be correctly rendered across most of the devices.

In React-Native-Emoji-Input you can limit emojis displayed by using filterFunctions prop and passing array of functions. Each of this function takes emoji as an single parameter and if every function passed in filterFunctions prop returns true then emoji will be included in final list.
We can use that to show only emojis which are part of Unicode 6.0 or Unicode 6.1 like so:

	filterFunctionByUnicode = emoji => {
		return emoji.lib.added_in === "6.0" || emoji.lib.added_in === "6.1"
	}

	<EmojiInput
		onEmojiSelected={this.handleEmojiSelected}
		ref={emojiInput => this._emojiInput = emojiInput}
		resetSearch={this.state.reset}
		loggingFunction={this.verboseLoggingFunction.bind(this)}
		verboseLoggingFunction={true}
		filterFunctions={[this.filterFunctionByUnicode]}
	/>

This will render only emojis from Unicode 6.0 and Unicode 6.1 in input.