Emoji RubyGem

New Ruby gem by Ryan Orr, making sense out of the emoji chaos:

There are 3 carriers (NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank & Au by KDDI) who’ve all created their own set of emoji glyphs in differing areas of the private-use range Unicode character space. Basic emoji supports 176 glyphs plus an additional 76 for C-HTML 4.0 for a total of 252. The iPhone — which uses the SoftBank implementation — supports 471 emoji glyphs and to top it off, Apple and Google have been working on a standards proposal for inclusion in ISO/IEC 10646 which proposes 722 glyphs in total. Confused yet? Right then.

With millions of mobile phones supporting emoji & Internet connections, web developers want to take advantage of the extended glyphs in the data they send to mobile devices but in the Ruby community there doesn’t seem to be a clear library that implements all 4 standards. Hence Emoji for Ruby.

★ Monday, 19 October 2009