C# regex to match emoji

Question

I would like a regex to match emoji characters in C#. If it matters, it's the characters from the Windows 8 touch keyboard ie. 😝 🍟🌃

Answer 1

\p{So}|\p{Cs}\p{Cs}(\p{Cf}\p{Cs}\p{Cs})* match all emojis I've tried and only those.

StringInfo was useful to make the pattern and might be usable directly instead of regex in some cases.

The pattern uses unicode categories, as shown in @MohaMad's answer. Again, with comments:

@"(?x)           # Enable free-spacing-mode (could have used RegexOptions instead)
\p{So}           # Match OtherSymbol, like ⏸ and ✅
|\p{Cs}\p{Cs}    # OR two Surrogate
 \uD83C\p{Cs}    # with color-modifier, like 👍🏿 and 👍
                 # (Hacky special case of Multibyte Character Set? It works.)
|\p{Cs}\p{Cs}    # OR two Surrogate, like 🔀 and 🧊
 (\p{Cf}         # followed by a Format
 \p{Cs}\p{Cs})   # and two Surrogate, like 👩‍💻 and 👨‍💻.
*                # zero or more times (I've only seen none or once.)"

Answer 2

There seems to be an Emoji-to-Unicode standard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#In_Unicode

So you can probably match each of the Unicode ranges. For example, to match the range from U+1F30x to U+1F5Fx you can use [\u1F30-\u1F5F] etc.