Remove emojis from text

How emojis are detected

A character counts as an emoji when the Unicode standard classes it as one and the screen draws it in colour: 😀, ⭐ and ✅ are emojis by nature, ❤️, ☀️ and ↔️ when they are followed by the invisible character that asks for colour. Every compound emoji counts as a single unit: families and couples built with the invisible ZWJ character (👨‍👩‍👧), flags made of two regional indicators (🇺🇸), the flags of England, Scotland and Wales, which carry a tail of invisible characters (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿), skin tones (👍🏽) and keycap digits (1️⃣). That is why the counter matches the emojis you see, and no invisible pieces are left behind after the clean-up.

What stays, and the spaces

Characters that are not emojis stay: letters, digits, punctuation and symbols, including those that look like little drawings but that the standard does not class as emojis, such as ★ ☆ ♪ ♭ ♯ ☐ ☒ ♡ ⚀ and ✓. Even ©, ®, ™, ♥, ☺, ✔ and ↔ written as text stay where they are: they only go when they are drawn in colour, that is when they are followed by the invisible character that asks for it. Pictographs such as 🌶 or 🕊, which almost every phone draws in colour even without that character, always go, and so do the newest emojis, even on a browser that does not know them yet. A lone regional indicator or skin tone, the pieces of a broken emoji, go as well.

Removing an emoji leaves behind the space that separated it from the words: in «Hello 👋 everyone» two would be left in a row, and a line that ended with an emoji would end with a space. That is why the page starts with «Remove extra spaces» already ticked, which closes those gaps; if you need the spaces as they were, untick it.

When you need emoji-free text

More often than you'd think: in email subject lines, emojis can trip spam filters or show up as empty boxes in older clients; some databases and business systems that aren't set up for full Unicode will truncate text at the first emoji; and text-to-speech engines and screen readers announce each one out loud ("face with tears of joy"), which ruins the listening experience. For formal documents, resumes, and work communication, a quick cleanup is often simply expected.

Several clean-ups at once, in a fixed order

Below the box you will find all ten clean-ups of this family, and you can tick as many as you like: each page starts with its own already ticked. The program is the same on all ten, so the same text with the same boxes gives the same result on whichever page you paste it.

The order does not depend on which boxes you tick, and it is the order you see them in: first the characters (emojis, accents, numbers, punctuation), then the spaces inside each line (tabs, indentation, extra spaces), then whole lines (blank and duplicate) and last of all joining everything into one line. So a line that is left empty once the emojis are gone disappears with the blank lines, and two lines that become identical once the spaces are gone count as duplicates.

The sister pages, each with its own box already ticked: Remove extra spaces, Remove indentation, Remove blank lines, Remove duplicate lines, Remove accents, Remove punctuation, Remove numbers, Text on one line and Tabs to spaces.