This is a test to see if emojis show up in post titles and post content. (Emoji functionality seems quite flaky in comments.)
Some emojis: 🌸💃🧚♀️🧜♀️🌸
(Interesting. They’re there, at least in the preview, but they’re from a different character set than what I see when I paste an emoji from elsewhere. Here’s two I’m typing: 🦔❤️. Yeah: Again not what I see when I pick an emoji via the native special character typing on the Mac; the native Mac hedgehog is facing left rather than forward, and the heart has some fancy tonal shading.)
@philipbrewer And here an emoji in a comment: . Thanks, @smokey!
@philipbrewer And the emojis in comments don’t make it to the blog, as previously observed.
@philipbrewer WordPress is one of the things (like Twitter) that replace native emoji glyphs with images using JavaScript instead, so that explains why the pictures you see don’t match the pictures you typed ;-)
@philipbrewer Huh. I really am confused now; I would have expected emoji working everywhere or nowhere. I know the webmentioning from Micro.blog back to WordPress preserves emoji elsewhere (e.g. this post from @colinwalker has several emoji in replies from Micro.blog—they got the WordPress image treatment on the blog, but they’re there…), so in theory it’s also not the webmention mechanism itself, either. I am officially stumped :-(
@smokey @philipbrewer that surprised me. I use emoji all the time in comments to my pupils. Just looked at my own blog and no emojis from comments and webmentions. Pupils blogs are on older 4.9 WP multisite. My own emojiless is up to date.
@johnjohnston @philipbrewer Maybe that’s the clue, something broken in 5.x?
Here are a pair of emoji using your blog’s own reply form:
@johnjohnston @philipbrewer I just left a native comment on Philip’s blog with the emoji pair, and (though it’s in moderation, I temporarily see what I submitted) they got stripped there, too.
John, I wonder if emoji in older comments that would have been made when you were running 4.x are missing now, too? That’s probably the beginning of a rabbit hole, so don’t go down it unless you really want to ;-)
@smokey my pupils blogs are still 4.9 Glow Blogs are a national effort in Scotland (I worked in development as ‘product owner’). We might have added something to allow emoji in comments. I am going to send a note for testers for when WordPress is updated to check. If you are trying to comment on a class load of blogs emoji are your friend.
@smokey @philipbrewer I recently moved hosts and all the emoji in my posts got converted to ???? – it was an encoding issue during export/import. Do you know what character set your databse it using? It looks like the export happened in sraight UTF8 where it should have been utf8mb4. (utf8mb4unicodeci to be precise.) Worth double checking. You can also specify in wp_config.php
@smokey @philipbrewer I recently moved hosts and all the emoji in my posts got converted to ???? – it was an encoding issue during export/import. Do you know what character set your databse it using? It looks like the export happened in straight UTF8 where it should have been utf8mb4. (utf8mb4_unicode_ci to be precise.) Worth double checking. You can also specify in wp_config.php
@smokey Maybe that’s a wordpress.com blog rather than a local install of the tool from wordpress.org?
@colinwalker Ah, that’s very likely. I set my database to UTF8 perhaps a decade ago, so I could support the special characters for Esperanto, and probably haven’t looked at it since.
@smokey @johnjohnston Thanks, both, for your efforts to debug this! Sorry I left the comments in moderation so long yesterday!
@philipbrewer It looks like Automattic started upgrading databases to utf8mb4 back in 4.2 (required for full emoji support) so if your database is still utf8 that may explain it. You could have to do a retrospective upgrade to your tables.