Emoji are text in all the ways that matter to a programmer. There are codepoints in Unicode which aren't textual, but emoji are not among them. Emoji don't in

Emoji are text in all the ways that matter to a programmer. There are codepoints in Unicode which aren't textual, but emoji are not among them. Emoji don't introduce any edge cases of their own. If your software can't join a skin tone to a thumbs up, it also will fall apart on composing many scripts used by hundreds of millions of people. So if you really want to get all kids-these-days about emoji, go ahead, but support Unicode properly. You'll get correct emoji handling as a consequence of that anyway, and you can still signal whatever message you're intending to send here about yourself in some other way.