Twitter Emoji – How to Use Twemoji on Your Website

😮 Did you know that the emoji you see on Twitter are not the same ones that are native to your device? Twitter uses their own custom emoji set called Twemoji, which provides a consistent emoji experience across all platforms. In this in-depth guide, we‘ll explore what Twemoji is, why it‘s beneficial, and how you can use it on your own website as a full-stack developer.

What is Twemoji?

Twemoji is an open-source emoji graphics library created by Twitter. It aims to solve the problem of emoji inconsistency across different devices and platforms.

If you‘ve ever sent an emoji to someone on a different type of phone and had it show up as a completely different icon (or worse, as a ▪️), you‘ve experienced this issue firsthand. It occurs because each operating system (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.) has its own set of emoji designs.

Twemoji provides a standardized set of emojis that look the same no matter where they‘re viewed. They‘re designed as vector graphics (SVG files) with fallback raster images (PNGs), ensuring crisp display at any size.

The Benefits of Using Twemoji

So why should you consider using Twemoji on your website or app? Here are a few key benefits:

1. Cross-platform consistency: With Twemoji, your users will see the exact same emojis regardless of their device or browser. This creates a more cohesive and professional look for your brand.

2. Always up-to-date: Twemoji supports the latest Unicode emoji standards, so you‘ll always have access to the newest emojis, even if your users‘ devices don‘t yet support them.

3. Easy to use: As we‘ll see in the implementation section, adding Twemoji to your site is a straightforward process that doesn‘t require any complex setup.

4. Customizable: While the default Twemoji style is great, you also have the option to use your own custom-designed emoji images while still taking advantage of the Twemoji parsing engine.

5. Open-source: Twemoji is completely open-source under the MIT license, which means you‘re free to use and modify it however you like.

Twemoji Usage Statistics

To get a sense of how widely used Twemoji is, let‘s look at some stats:

• Twemoji is used on all of Twitter‘s web and mobile properties, serving billions of emojis per day to over 330 million monthly active users.
• According to BuiltWith, over 600,000 websites currently use Twemoji. This includes major sites like Tinder, Shopify, and CNN.
• The Twemoji repository on GitHub has over 12,000 stars and 1,200 forks, indicating a high level of developer interest and contribution.

These numbers show that Twemoji is a mature, well-supported project that‘s trusted by some of the largest websites in the world.

How Twemoji Works

Now let‘s dive into the technical details of how Twemoji actually works.

The core of Twemoji is a JavaScript library that parses emoji Unicode characters and replaces them with tags pointing to the corresponding Twemoji SVG or PNG image files.

For example, let‘s say you have the following HTML on your page:

I‘m feeling happy 😊 today!

When you apply the Twemoji library to this page, it will convert that emoji character into an image tag like so:

I‘m feeling happy today!

As you can see, the 😊 Unicode character has been replaced with an tag pointing to the Twemoji SVG file for that emoji.

The Twemoji SVG and PNG files are named according to the Unicode codepoints for each emoji. For example, the "smiling face with smiling eyes" emoji (😊) has the Unicode codepoint U+1F60A, so its corresponding Twemoji files are named 1f60a.svg and 1f60a.png.

Implementing Twemoji on Your Website

Now that we understand how Twemoji works under the hood, let‘s walk through how to actually use it on a website.

Step 1: Include the Twemoji Script

The first step is to include the Twemoji JavaScript library on your page. You can do this by adding the following tag to your HTML:

This will load the latest minified version of Twemoji from the jsDelivr CDN.

Step 2: Parse the Page Content

Next, you need to tell Twemoji to parse your page content and replace the native emoji characters with Twemoji images. There are two ways to do this:

1. Parse the entire page body: This is the simplest approach. After your page content has loaded, just call twemoji.parse() and pass in the document.body element:

<body>
  <!-- Your page content here -->

  <script>
    twemoji.parse(document.body);
  </script>
</body>

This will find and replace all emoji characters in the page body.

2. Parse specific elements: If you only want to apply Twemoji to certain parts of the page, you can pass specific HTML elements to twemoji.parse() instead of the whole body:

const myElement = document.querySelector(‘.my-element‘);
twemoji.parse(myElement);

This will only parse and replace emoji characters within that specific element and its children.

Step 3: Customize (Optional)

Twemoji provides a few options for customizing the parsing behavior and image display:

• folder: The folder where the Twemoji images are located. The default is "svg", but you can also use "png" if you prefer raster images.
• ext: The file extension for the image files. Defaults to ".svg" for the SVG folder and ".png" for the PNG folder.
• className: The class name to apply to the generated tags. Defaults to "emoji".
• size: The size of the Twemoji images. Can be "72×72" (default), "36×36", or a custom size like "128×128".
• callback: A function to call for each emoji that‘s found. This allows you to modify the generated tag or replace it with custom HTML.

Here‘s an example of using some of these options:

twemoji.parse(document.body, {
  folder: ‘png‘,
  ext: ‘.png‘,
  size: ‘72x72‘,
  className: ‘custom-emoji‘,
  callback: function(icon, options, variant) {
    return `<span class="emoji-wrapper">${icon}</span>`;
  }
});

This configuration will:

• Use PNG images instead of SVGs
• Set the image size to 72×72 pixels
• Add a "custom-emoji" class to each tag
• Wrap each tag in a with the class "emoji-wrapper"

Using Twemoji with React

If you‘re building a React app, you can easily integrate Twemoji using the react-twemoji library. This library provides a component that wraps the native Twemoji parsing functionality.

First, install the library with npm or yarn:

npm install react-twemoji

Then, import the component into your React component:

import Twemoji from ‘react-twemoji‘;

function MyComponent() {
  return (
    <div>
      <p>Hello <Twemoji>😊</Twemoji></p>
    </div>
  );
}

The component will automatically parse the emoji characters in its children and replace them with tags.

You can also pass options to customize the parsing behavior, just like with the vanilla JavaScript version:

<Twemoji
  options={{
    folder: ‘svg‘,
    ext: ‘.svg‘
  }}
>
  😊 😎 🚀
</Twemoji>

Advanced Usage

For most use cases, the basic implementation covered above will be sufficient. However, the Twemoji library does offer some more advanced features for those who need them.

Custom Image Source

By default, Twemoji will load images from the Twemoji CDN at https://twemoji.maxcdn.com/. If you want to host the images yourself, you can specify a custom base URL with the base option:

twemoji.parse(document.body, {
  base: ‘https://my-website.com/twemoji/‘
});

This will make Twemoji load images from the specified base URL instead of the default CDN.

Handling Non-Standard Emoji

Twemoji follows the Unicode emoji standards, but there are some non-standard emoji characters that aren‘t part of the official spec. To handle these, Twemoji uses a separate "non-fully-qualified" (NFQ) Unicode namespace.

For example, the "digit zero" emoji (0️⃣) is not a fully-qualified emoji, so its Twemoji file name uses the NFQ syntax:

svg/0023-20e3.svg

If you need to work with NFQ emoji, you‘ll need to keep this alternate naming scheme in mind.

Low-Level Functions

In addition to the high-level parse() function, Twemoji also provides some lower-level utility functions for more granular control:

• twemoji.convert.fromCodePoint(): Converts a Unicode codepoint to an NFQ code.
• twemoji.convert.toCodePoint(): Converts an NFQ code to a Unicode codepoint.
• twemoji.convert.toHexCodePoint(): Converts an NFQ code to a hexadecimal codepoint.

These functions can be useful if you‘re working with NFQ emoji or building custom emoji parsing logic.

Twemoji FAQ

To wrap up, let‘s address some common questions and misconceptions about Twemoji:

Q: Do I need to attribute Twitter when using Twemoji?
A: Nope! The Twemoji graphics are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, which means you can use them freely without attribution.

Q: Can I use Twemoji on native mobile apps?
A: Yes, but you‘ll need to bundle the image files with your app rather than loading them from the CDN. There are also Twemoji libraries available for iOS and Android that can help with this.

Q: Are there any downsides to using Twemoji?
A: The main potential downside is the additional network requests required to load the image files. However, this is mitigated by the fact that the images are served from a fast CDN and will be cached by the browser after the initial load.

Q: Can I use Twemoji with other JavaScript libraries like jQuery?
A: Absolutely! The twemoji.parse() function can be used with any DOM element, regardless of how it was created.

Q: What if I want to use my own custom emoji designs?
A: You can still use the Twemoji parsing engine with your own images. Just host your image files and point Twemoji to their location using the base option as described in the Advanced Usage section.

Conclusion

In this comprehensive guide, we‘ve covered everything you need to know about using Twitter emoji (Twemoji) on your website as a full-stack developer.

We‘ve seen how Twemoji solves the problem of inconsistent emoji rendering across platforms, and how it can be easily integrated into any web project with just a few lines of code.

By using Twemoji, you can ensure that your users always see your intended emoji designs, creating a more polished and professional experience.

So go forth and add some emoji flair to your websites – with Twemoji, it‘s never been easier! 🚀