# wemoji
Universal emoji database used by Wedgies. A near drop-in replacement for [gemoji](https://www.npmjs.com/package/gemoji) with better data, plus perfectly matched CSS display and [emoji picker](https://github.com/wedgies/jquery-emoji-picker) assets for front and back end harmony. Built off of [emoji-data](https://github.com/iamcal/emoji-data)
We go front, we go back, we go inside-out, and then, we go front and back. For emoji.
## Installation
```bash
$ npm install wemoji
```
## Usage
```javascript
var wemoji = require('wemoji')
wemoji.name['dragon']
```
Yields:
```javascript
{ emoji: '🐉',
platforms: [ 'tw', 'a', 'g' ],
description: 'DRAGON',
name: 'dragon',
css: 'dragon',
category: 'animal' }
```
## By unicode emoji:
```javascript
wemoji.unicode['🏩']
```
Yields:
```javascript
{ emoji: '🏩',
platforms: [ 'tw', 'a', 'g' ],
description: 'LOVE HOTEL',
name: 'love_hotel',
css: 'love_hotel',
category: 'travel' }
```
## Fields Returned
- **emoji** : the utf-8 representation of the emoji
- **platform** : an array of platforms with images for this emoji (_a_ is for apple, _g_ is for google, _tw_ is for twitter)
- **description** : the official unicode description in loud-case
- **name** : short name
- **css** : the css class suffix for the stylesheets, not always the same as the name
- **category** : the name of the category we use in our picker
- **variations** : if the emoji has variations, they will be included in this array as utf-8
## Assets
You can install the front end assets using bower:
```bash
$ bower install wemoji-assets
```
If you don't like bower, you can just grab them from our [git repository](https://github.com/wedgies/wemoji/tree/master/dist).
## Asset Usage
Just include the ```emoji.css``` and one of ```wemoji-tw.css```, ```wemoji-g.css```, ```wemoji-a.css```. Each corresponds to *twitter*, *google*, and *apple* depending on your choice. There is also an HTML file so you can easily preview each set.
There is now also a version of the CSS that uses external assets from the [emoji-data](https://github.com/iamcal/emoji-data) project. The files are called ```wemoji-ext-tw.css```, ```wemoji-ext-g.css```, ```wemoji-ext-a.css``` respectively. You can define the image paths that the CSS points
to in `config.json` per platform. We don't copy the images into dist for you though, so you'll need to pull them out of emoji-data yourself. For example, with the default
`config.json` settings, and if you just want to use the twitter emoji, try something like this:
```
mkdir -p dist/img/emoji-tw
cp -R emoji-data/img-twitter-64/* dist/img/emoji-tw
```
The markup that we use with this css is:
```html
LOVE HOTEL
```
You can create the proper CSS class name by prepending ```emoji-``` to the 'css' field of wemoji. If you use [emoji-text](https://www.npmjs.com/package/emoji-text), you can do that easily like this:
```javascript
var emojiText = require('emoji-text')
var util = require('util')
emojiText.convert( str, { callback: function(emoji, data) {
return util.format('%s',
data.css, data.description);
}
})
```
The text inside the span ensures that the meaning of the emoji can be seen by a screen reader or text based browser. The emoji class will hide it away for graphical browsers.
## Rebuilding Everything
We use [emoji-data](https://github.com/iamcal/emoji-data) as a submodule, so make sure you check out and initial the submodule prior to trying a rebuild.
```bash
$ git clone https://github.com/wedgies/wemoji
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update
$ npm install
$ grunt build
```
## Why?
When we decided to write emoji support into our platform we were inspired by lots of great projects such as [twemoji](https://github.com/twitter/twemoji), [emojify](https://github.com/hassankhan/emojify.js), and [emoji-data](https://github.com/iamcal/emoji-data). If we put them together, we could have a complete front and back end solution. But there was one little problem - there were slight differences in each platform that made them hard to combine without a lot of little hacks. We also wanted to support a universal set of emoji that had glyphs not in github, so [gemoji](https://www.npmjs.com/package/gemoji) was out.
We looked at each and decided that emoji-data had the nicest and most complete data, so that is what we decided to start with and build out everything else we needed:
- an npm data source module to replace gemoji (we plug this data into [emoji-text](https://www.npmjs.com/package/emoji-text) to accessibly convert emoji on our back end)
- CSS stylesheets with data-uri encoded images similar to those provided by [emojify](https://github.com/hassankhan/emojify.js) - a separate one for twitter, apple, and github emoji icons.
- A matched JSON data file to plug into our [emoji picker](https://github.com/wedgies/jquery-emoji-picker)
[](http://wedgies.com)