Guide
Removing emoji from text, or listing the ones that were used
Emoji are part of everyday writing, but not every system welcomes them. Old databases turn them into question marks, formal reports look odd with them, and some import tools reject the whole row. Removing them by hand is tedious, and quick find-and-replace tricks usually leave fragments behind. This tool removes complete emoji, or lists and counts them.
Why emoji are tricky
A single emoji on screen can be several characters underneath. 👍🏽 is a thumbs-up plus a skin-tone modifier. A flag is two regional-indicator letters. Family and profession emoji are several emoji joined by invisible zero-width joiners. Hearts and stars often carry an invisible variation selector that asks for the colorful style. Removing only the visible part leaves invisible joiners and selectors that still break imports and confuse character counts. Here each emoji is recognised as one unit, as you see it, and removed together with its invisible parts.
What is kept
Copyright, registered and trademark signs (©, ®, ™) are not treated as emoji, even though some phones can draw them that way. Plain digits and the # sign stay, so “#1” in a ranking is untouched while the keycap emoji 1️⃣ is removed. With “Keep text symbols” on, single symbols such as ☺, ★, ✓ and ♥ written without the emoji style also stay, which suits lists and checkmarks.
Replacements and spacing
Emoji can be removed outright, replaced by a space, by the label [emoji] for later review, or by a square. Removing emoji from the middle of a sentence often leaves two spaces next to each other; “Tidy double spaces” cleans that up along with spaces left at line ends.
Extracting and counting
Switch to Extract to get only the emoji, once each or every occurrence in order. The list underneath shows each emoji with how often it appears and its Unicode code points, sorted from most to least used. Social media managers use this to see how an audience reacts in comments, and researchers use it as a quick first look at emoji in survey answers or chat data.
New emoji
Emoji are added to Unicode every year. Recognition relies on your browser’s Unicode data, so a brand-new emoji is detected once your browser knows it, which usually happens with regular updates.
Private processing
All processing happens in your browser. Comments, chats and exports you paste are never uploaded.
A worked example
The caption “Launch day 🚀🚀 Thanks everyone 🙏🏽 — see you in Paris 🇫🇷!” becomes “Launch day Thanks everyone — see you in Paris!” with tidy spacing on. The counters show four emoji found and three different ones, and the list underneath shows 🚀 twice, the praying hands with its skin tone once, and the French flag once, each with its code points.
Before an import
If emoji cause trouble in a database or spreadsheet import, clean the column text here first, then check the character counts: some systems count an emoji as two characters, so a field that was over its limit may fit after cleaning. Keep the original file, because the emoji cannot be recovered from the cleaned version. When you only want to know whether a text contains emoji at all, paste it and look at the “Emoji found” counter without copying anything.
Related tools
Remove other characters with Remove Punctuation, fix spacing and line breaks with the Text Cleaner, and check the length after cleaning with the Character Counter or Word Counter.
Checked against the current version of the Remove Emojis from Text on .