Replace emoji in a text column with words (demojize)

emoji_to_text() returns a copy of data with its text column rewritten so that every emoji is replaced by its name or shortcode. This is useful for accessibility (screen readers) and as an NLP normalisation step before tokenising. Detection is grapheme-aware and joins go through emoji_key(), so emoji carrying the U+FE0F variation selector still resolve.

Usage

emoji_to_text(data, text, format = c("name", "shortcode"), wrap = ":{x}:")

Arguments

data

A data frame or tibble containing a text column. Grouped data frames are accepted. The verbs that work a row at a time (adding columns, or keeping and expanding rows) carry the grouping through to their result, as dplyr::mutate() and dplyr::filter() do. The verbs that pool across rows – the counts, the co-occurrence edge lists, the time series – warn that they ignore the grouping and return one corpus-wide answer.

text

The text column to scan, supplied unquoted. Any atomic column is accepted and read as character, so a factor works and a numeric, Date or logical one simply contains no emoji. A list column – or a data-frame column – is refused rather than coerced, because coercing one deparses it and the emoji found would be in the code rather than in your data. What counts as an emoji is the same in every verb; see the Detection section of tidyEmoji for the one case that surprises people, code points that are emoji only when they carry U+FE0F.

format

Output form: "name" (the Unicode name, e.g. "grinning face") or "shortcode" (the canonical GitHub-style alias, e.g. "grinning", wrapped as ":grinning:"). Default "name".

wrap

When format = "shortcode", the wrapper applied to each shortcode, written as a template with {x} standing for the shortcode. Default ":{x}:". Must contain {x}, or every emoji would be replaced by the same literal string. Ignored for format = "name".

Only the default is reversible by text_to_emoji(), which looks for exactly :shortcode:; a wrap that does not produce that token leaves the shortcode in the text as an ordinary word, silently. See emoji_sanitize() for the cases.

Value

data, as a tibble, with the text column rewritten in place (same column name). NA entries stay NA, and emoji with no known name are left in place unchanged.

See also

text_to_emoji() for the inverse (emojize); as_emoji_name(), as_emoji_shortcode(), as_emoji() for vector helpers.

Examples

df <- data.frame(text = "great \U0001f600 love \u2764\ufe0f")
emoji_to_text(df, text, format = "name")
#> # A tibble: 1 × 1
#>   text                              
#>   <chr>                             
#> 1 great grinning face love red heart
emoji_to_text(df, text, format = "shortcode")
#> # A tibble: 1 × 1
#>   text                         
#>   <chr>                        
#> 1 great :grinning: love :heart: