Image displaying various emoji.

WordPress 💖 Emoji

The latest stable version of WordPress, and all those precede it, do not support emoji. The default database character set used simply isn’t compatible with it.

Emoji are the next generation of emoticons. They’re the little pictographs like ????????. Quite frankly, I love them. Can’t get enough of them.

I’m happy to say that work is being done to add these to WordPress. Already in trunk (the up-to-the-second version of WordPress) is the ability to save to the database in the correct character set needed, if you’re using a recent-enough version of MySQL, but hopefully soon, a graceful method for using them within WordPress and ensuring that all visitors can see them—some browsers and operating system combinations will render them, some won’t. I’m testing out all of this on this site—beware of dragons.

If you’re viewing this in Chrome, if it wasn’t for this in-development method, none of these characters would show: ????????????????????.

This is a relatively big change—a different character set in the database and how to handle the different places/ways characters are expected. Everything from the URL of the post to RSS feeds to the e-mailed newsletter that this post will generate tomorrow morning. Quite frankly, I’m not sure what’ll look like and, if it looks bad, how feasible it is to fix it.

If you notice problems, leave me a comment. The ideal is we’d merge this with trunk after another week or two, so help 23+% of the Internet and report any bugs.

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