Ruby Emoji

Ruby’s Regexp character properties provides a nice way to check for emoji characters:

"👍".match?(/\p{Emoji}/)
=> true

However, to check if a string consists entirely of emoji, the following does not work:

"❤️👍".match?(/^(\p{Emoji})$/)
=> false # ⁉️

❤️ is a compound emoji consisting of two characters: U+2764 (emoji), and a modifier U+FE0F (not emoji). So perform this check accurately, we use the grapheme_clusters string method. As implied, this splits the string into clusters of characters including their modifiers:

"❤️👍".grapheme_clusters
=> ["❤️", "👍"]

Modifiers come after the initial emoji, so if we check each cluster starts with an emoji we achieve the expected result:

"❤️👍".grapheme_clusters.all? { |e| e.match?(/^\p{Emoji}/) }
=> true