WordPress-generated RSS feeds replace unicode symbols with images.

[jralls]

Which rather misses the point of having them as part of Unicode. This causes trouble for feed readers because the images have to be handled specially in order for them to format with the text, e.g. ​https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/issues/1958

[SergeyBiryukov]

Hi there, welcome to WordPress Trac! Thanks for the report.

Just noting that this was done intentionally in [31733] / #31242, with some follow-ups in [31791] and [32161].

IIRC, it was done this way because emoji support in various browsers and feed readers is not quite consistent. The ticket (#31242) might have more details.

[ayeshrajans]

With all the complexity of Unicode and character encoding aside, I wonder if we still need this workaround to support Emojis. We can now store them in the database with utf8mb4, and pretty much every browser should be supporting complex characters by now.

At least in Windows, country flags still do not work. I'm not sure if this is because the glyphes are missing, or Windows cannot handle zero-width joiner characters correctly, but either way, pretty much every browser/OS has good Emoji support now.

Using staticize means we have to rely on s.w.org design choices and for them to keep up with the Emoji standard. For example, I don't think they support the latest Emoji 13 standard.

I'd like to propose that we re-evaluate if the native handling for Emojis are good enough. This can be of course done with a plugin as well, which removes wp_staticize_emoji filter whenever it is applied for a feed.

[jralls]

@ayeshrajans, Thanks, that's exactly my point. It's not only not necessary in 2020, it's demonstrably harmful in some cases.

[SergeyBiryukov]

#52445 was marked as a duplicate.