Thursday, October 20, 2016

ClipEmoji.com – Copy emoji characters to your clipboard!

While it’s easy to type emoji characters on a smartphone or tablet, it’s not as straightforward in most chat clients on a PC.  When I’ve wanted to insert an emoji into a chat message from my PC, I’ve previously resorted to workarounds like googling the name of the emoji, finding a site with information about it, copying it to my clipboard from there, and pasting it into the chat.

I decided to take the past couple of evenings and build a better solution. Introducing ClipEmoji.com, a site that allows you to copy emoji to the clipboard with a single mouse click!

ClipEmoji.com also supports search-as-you-type, so you can quickly get a visual list of all emoji that contain “smile” as part of their name, for example.

The emoji are actual unicode characters, not images, and will therefore vary in appearance depending on which platform they are being viewed on.

The emoji names and keywords are from the Full Emoji Data chart at unicode.org and are used with permission.

Transforming the unicode.org data for use on ClipEmoji.com, which I did with a one-off C# program that parsed the Full Emoji Data HTML and constructed the ClipEmoji.com HTML, was educational. I learned that many emoji “characters” are actually composed of combinations of multiple raw characters – so, for example, when grabbing an emoji character from a string, assuming that the emoji character has a string length of 1 is a mistake!

Feel free to bookmark and share ClipEmoji.com if you find it useful, and to let me know if you have any questions or suggestions! 😁