Using Emojis Revisited

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I already reported on my learnings on the emo package in conjunction with some pull requests for interactive tutorials for the OpenIntro textbook Introduction to Modern Statistics. In the meanwhile, the book is — after some reorganization of its chapters — finished and published. I ordered the print version of the book via Amazon.

On August 13th, I started working through the tutorials and reading the new book and prepared several pull requests. There I encountered the problem of finding a special emoji without knowing the name or keyword. Meanwhile, I solved the difficulty of finding the emoji name for 🔟. There are even several solutions.

Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel referenced the EmojiTerra.com website to me. There you can search for the symbol to get all the details of the corresponding emoji.
With emo::ji_name, you will get a list of 4239 names as character strings and their corresponding value as emoji. But you have to inspect the list manually, which really is not practical. (At least I did not find a better solution programmatically.)
A more practical solution is to produce a data frame with emojis_df <- emo::jis and to inspect it via the RStudio command View(emojis_df). There you can put the emoji symbol into the search field to get the required information.
You could also get the Unicode on macOS via the window for emojis and symbols (CMD-SHIFT-SPACE) with a right-click on the icon. You will get a bunch of localized information, including the Unicode.

Screenshot of macOS window showing keycap-10 emoji

🔟
Taste mit der Zahl 10
Unicode: U+1F51F, UTF-8: F0 9F 94 9F

Summary

All in all, just options 1 and 3 are feasible in a practical manner. Either to call the EmojiTerra.com website or to use View(emo::jis) inside RStudio.

Using Emojis in R and R Markdown

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I worked on some pull requests for interactive tutorials for the OpenIntro textbook Introduction to Modern Statistics. There I came across the package emo. Its purpose is: “Easily insert emoji into and RMarkdown”.

I was surprised that there is a special package. I didn’t think that including emojis wouldn’t be a problem – at least on the macOS. I only have to open the window for emojis and symbols (CMD-SHIFT-SPACE) and double click on the icon to insert it into the markdown document. No big deal, so what’s the matter?

Screenshot of macOS window showing a selection of emojis

After I searched online, I saw that there many questions (and solutions) about this problem. There is on CRAN a special package emojifont for using emojis and Font Awesome in base R and ggplot2 graphics and with emoGG another one on GitHub.

For me, it is still not clear what exactly the problem is. Perhaps it has to do with different operating systems? Does the Unicode not translate to all systems?

Anyway, I looked into emo, and it turned out that it offers some useful functions when working with strings containing emojis. You can also add emojis to summarize p-values. Additionally, I learned several things:

With emojis_df <- emo::jis, you get a data frame with 3570 emoticons categorized by 21 variables.
In emojis_df, you will find the keywords for each emoji. But this is problematic as they are not unique. In the ReadMe of emo in GitHub, you will see a massive list of multiple references for each keyword.
If you are using keywords, the command emo::ji(<keyword>) will randomly pick one.

emo::ji("face")
emo::ji("face")
emo::ji("face")

## 😈
## 💆 
## 👼

To identify, you have to use the short name of the Common Local Data Repository (CDLR) included in the emojis_df. If you want to use emojis with a particular skin tone, you have to use the alias name as the CDLR name produces an error. Instead of looking up an emoji within the above-created data frame emojis_df, I found it more practicable to search in the official Unicode Emoji List. It has not so many different columns but focuses on icon display and CLDR short name.

emo | Thought splinters

Using Emojis Revisited

Summary

Using Emojis in R and R Markdown