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:

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:

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.