emoji-data - Easy to consume Emoji data and images

This project provides easy-to-parse data about emoji, along with a spritesheet-style images for use on the web.

The current version supports Emoji version 15.1 (Sept 2023)

You can see a catalog of the emoji data here: http://projects.iamcal.com/emoji-data/table.htm

Installation

The git repo is pretty big (almost 4GB), but contains everything. If you want to use npm, you can:

npm install emoji-datasource

This will only install the 32px full-fidelity spritesheets (with fallback images). If you want different size sheets (16, 20 or 64px), quantized sheets (128 or 256 color), non-fallback (clean) sheets, or the individual images (at 64px) then you'll need to install additional npm modules:

npm install emoji-datasource-apple
npm install emoji-datasource-google
npm install emoji-datasource-twitter
npm install emoji-datasource-facebook

You can also use it without downloading via jsDelivr CDN (different sizes here).

Using the data

The file you want is emoji.json. It contains an array of entries for emoji that look like this:

[
    {
        "name": "WHITE UP POINTING INDEX",
        "unified": "261D-FE0F",
        "non_qualified": "261D",
        "docomo": null,
        "au": "E4F6",
        "softbank": "E00F",
        "google": "FEB98",
        "image": "261d.png",
        "sheet_x": 1,
        "sheet_y": 2,
        "short_name": "point_up",
        "short_names": [
            "point_up"
        ],
        "text": null,
        "texts": null,
        "category": "People & Body",
        "subcategory": "hand-single-finger",
        "sort_order": 170,
        "added_in": "1.4",
        "has_img_apple": true,
        "has_img_google": true,
        "has_img_twitter": true,
        "has_img_facebook": false,
        "skin_variations": {
            "1F3FB": {
                "unified": "261D-1F3FB",
                "image": "261d-1f3fb.png",
                "sheet_x": 1,
                "sheet_y": 3,
                "added_in": "6.0",
                "has_img_apple": true,
                "has_img_google": false,
                "has_img_twitter": false,
                "has_img_facebook": false,
            }
            ...
            "1F3FB-1F3FC": {
                ...
            }
        },
        "obsoletes": "ABCD-1234",
        "obsoleted_by": "5678-90EF"
    },
    ...
]

The meaning of each field is as follows:

Fields	Description
name	The offical Unicode name, in SHOUTY UPPERCASE.
unified	The Unicode codepoint, as 4-5 hex digits. Where an emoji needs 2 or more codepoints, they are specified like 1F1EA-1F1F8. For emoji that need to specifiy a variation selector (-FE0F), that is included here.
non_qualified	For emoji that also have usage without a variation selector, that version is included here (otherwise is null).
docomo, au, softbank, google	The legacy Unicode codepoints used by various mobile vendors.
image	The name of the image file.
sheet_x, sheet_y	The position of the image in the spritesheets.
short_name	The commonly-agreed upon short name for the image, as supported in campfire, github etc via the :colon-syntax:
short_names	An array of all the known short names.
text	An ASCII version of the emoji (e.g. :)), or null where none exists.
texts	An array of ASCII emoji that should convert into this emoji. Each ASCII emoji will only appear against a single emoji entry.
category, subcategory	Category and sub-category group names.
sort_order	Global sorting index for all emoji, based on Unicode CLDR ordering.
added_in	Emoji version in which this codepoint/sequence was added (previously Unicode version).
has_img_*	A flag for whether the given image set has an image (named by the image prop) available.
skin_variations	For emoji with multiple skin tone variations, a list of alternative glyphs, keyed by the skin tone. For emoji that support multiple skin tones within a single emoji, each skin tone is separated by a dash character.
obsoletes, obsoleted_by	Emoji that are no longer used, in preference of gendered versions.

Understanding the spritesheets

For each image set (Apple, Google, etc) we generate several different "sprite sheets" - large images of all emoji stitched together.

Every emoji image in the sheet has a 1 pixel transparent border around it, so the 64px sheet is really made up of 66px squares, while the 16px sheet is really made up of 18px squares, etc. You can find the position of any given image on a sheet using the sheet_x and sheet_y properties, as follows:

x = (sheet_x * (sheet_size + 2)) + 1;
y = (sheet_y * (sheet_size + 2)) + 1;

Inside the Git repo you'll find some sheets in the root directory and some in the sheets-indexed-128, sheets-indexed-256 and sheets-clean directories. In the NPM packages, you'll find them under the img/{$set}/sheets* paths. For example:

Git Repo	NPM Packages
/sheet_apple_16.png	/img/apple/sheets/16.png
/sheets-indexed-128/sheet_apple_16_indexed_128.png	/img/apple/sheets-128/16.png
/sheets-clean/sheet_apple_16_clean.png	/img/apple/sheets-clean/16.png

In these examples, the image set is from Apple and the images are 16px on a side. The sheets on the top row are 24 bit color, while the sheets in the middle row use an indexed color palette with only 128 colors. This makes the image much smaller, but sacrifices a lot of quality. Both 128 color and 256 color sheets are provided. The sheets on the bottom row do not contain fallbacks for missing images, so the Google sheet only contains Google images (and no Apple fallbacks). This means that some images are replaced with the fallback character (a question mark), but the usage rights are simpler.

Version history

See CHANGES.md

Image Sources

Images are extracted from their sources and this library attempts to track the latest available versions. If you're looking for older versions of Apple or Android images (such as the Hairy Heart) then you'll need to look at previous revisions.

Image Set	Source Version	Supported Emoji	Missing Images
Apple	iOS 17.4 beta	Emoji 15.1	3
Google	Noto Emoji, v2.042	Emoji 15.1	0
Twitter	Twemoji (fork), v15.0.3	Emoji 15.0	118
Facebook	v9, fetched 2024-02-05	Emoji 15.0	142

• Apple images, Copyright © Apple Inc., are not licensed for commercial usage.
• Android/Google/Noto images, are available under the Apache License 2.0.
• Twitter images are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
• Facebook images, © Facebook, Inc., have no clear licensing.

If you use the spritesheet images and are concerned about usage rights, please use the 'clean' versions, which avoid using fallback images for missing emoji (see the spritesheet section above for more details).

Libraries which use this data

• https://github.com/iamcal/js-emoji - JavaScript emoji library
• https://github.com/iamcal/php-emoji - PHP emoji library
• https://github.com/mroth/emoji-data-js - NodeJS emoji library
• https://github.com/jpalumickas/emoji-datasource-ruby - Ruby emoji library
• https://github.com/mroth/exmoji - Elixir/Erlang emoji library
• https://github.com/needim/wdt-emoji-bundle - a Slack-style JavaScript emoji picker
• https://github.com/mroth/emojistatic - emoji image CDN
• https://github.com/juanfran/emoji-data-css - emoji css files
• https://github.com/afeld/emoji-css/ - an easy way to include emoji in your HTML
• https://github.com/alexmick/emoji-data-python - Python emoji library
• https://github.com/nulab/emoji-data-ts - TypeScript emoji library
• https://github.com/maxoumime/emoji-data-ios - Swift emoji library
• https://github.com/maxoumime/emoji-data-java - Java/Kotlin emoji library
• https://github.com/kyokomi/emoji - Golang emoji library
• https://github.com/joeattardi/emoji-button - Plain JavaScript emoji picker
• https://github.com/missive/emoji-mart - React emoji picker components