如何在类似于Gmail和Facebook的文本区域中实现表情符号

Question

How would I go about this? Are they images?
How can I make it so that when the user types ':D' it turns into a face emoji?

A general explanation would be great. I have no idea how you can put images in textareas.

Answer 1

Emojis are just unicode, not images, so they can be used as text. To change their look, use a different font:

Extracted from http://www.businessinsider.com/unicode-emoji-chart-2015-12

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But they aren't on (fisical) keyboards, so what some services do is to put a lot of buttons with their corresponding emoji so you can type them easily.

But what YounesM said is also true:

... you could simply have a script that look for ' :D ' and replace it by 😃

Other services, instead of filling a div with button s, run a script when you create or edit a post/question/answer/comment/other for replacing specific substrings with emoji.