Emoji Support
 

We use Tapatalk to allow our forum members to use our Forum in an app. Obviously Emoji's are becoming a big thing these days so they are being used in posts. That is fine on Tapatalk when your viewing the posts in the app, but when you view the posts on a PC, you end up with the strange icons. (Screenshot attached)

This wouldn't be an issue, except for the fact that when you click to edit a post (on a PC) the contents of the post disappears and you can't edit it. It just becomes a blank text box.

My first question is, has anyone else encountered this?

And second, can anyone suggest how I could over come this?

Cheers

What is Emoji's

They are like emoticons/smilies... :) :D :cool:

But they are native to an iPhone/Android keyboard.

Image attached comparing what you see on a PC and on an iPhone.

Surely there is someone who has encountered this type of thing, with the growing amount of mobile users, the use of emojis would be pretty popular.

It is on our forum anyway...

how does that look without text formatting in your post?

I'm not sure I know what you mean?

This is what the text looks like in the database:

haven't testet but just add an emoji like a usual smilie and use 😊 as the text replacement.

Yeah I did actually try that - but it didn't change the emojis that were already in the database - or will the smiley only work for posts after I add the smiley in the backend?

--------------- Added [DATE]1444346815[/DATE] at [TIME]1444346815[/TIME] ---------------

UPDATE

I did create a new smiley - but used the this �� instead of this ?Ÿ˜Š - and that changed the emoji to a proper emoticon.

HOWEVER - I still can't 'Edit Post' on a PC if one of those characters (��) exist in the text.

Any ideas to overcome that?

Well that didn't work .... I used the attached code

is your tapatalk addon up to date?

testet at customers forum, standard emojis were replaced, but look a little crappy :D

This reply is from my iPhone - and below are a set of emojis

������

I'm going to post this and then see what they look like on my PC

--------------- Added [DATE]1444692299[/DATE] at [TIME]1444692299[/TIME] ---------------

On both my iPhone and PC (Firefox and Chrome) they appear as white question marks in a black diamond.

Regardless of Tapatalk - is there a way to support Emojis?

Emoticons/Smilies are supported but not Emojis in particular. I see the white question marks in the black diamonds. I believe you're using what's included on your phone as emojis or an app to use emojis which will not work in vBulletin as it doesn't know the emojis on your phone/app respectively. I do not know of a way to support this unless as someone mentioned above Tapatalk or another phone type mod supports it.

The problem with emojis is that they are unique to the device/os. what may look like a dog on one person's device, looks like the green Droid on mine, or comes across as strange symbols, because the sender has custom emojis installed, and I do not.

So if someone uses an emoji from the iOS keyboard, is there anyway to convert it to something that vbulletin will understand? Not necessarily show the emoji, but understand the code that creates it.

For example if I make a post on our site from my iPhone, and add an emoji from the native keyboard. I can see the emoji on my phone, and all I see on a desktop is a rectangle with 6 characters in it (like my screenshot above). The issue is, when I go to edit that post from my desktop, the edit box appears but the post text is not there, it's just an empty box.

This is is the issue I am having.

However it seems the same thing is not happening on vbulletin.org - my emojis just get shown as black diamonds after posting (both iPhone and PC) - somewhere they are being converted into something else.

Can anyone explain that?

sorry, android only, so i cannot help you.

You would have to ask Tapatalk, as they would have to code it in their plugin.

Just taking Tapatalk out of the equation for a second, my example above of posting from my iPhone was just from Safari - so it's all vBulletin - no Tapatalk at all.

How can vBulletin convert the iOS emoji characters into something else?

I'm in the same point. Any solution for this?