Client gives comment in UTF-8 that may contain emoji characters. Sometimes, his keyboard automatically changes normal text into emojis.
I want to send this comment to some API that breaks with emoji.
How can I transliterate UTF-8 string to UTF-8 without emoji?
I'd like a method that would at least attempt to transliterate emoji into text, for example "" into ":P", because such emoji may have been send unintentionally, I'd like to attempt to repair previous text meaning. Thus solutions that simply remove them with preg_replace or similar are not enough.
I can't simply transliterate into ascii, as there may be UTF-8 characters of exotic languages.
Alternative solution: Is there a way how to forbid mobile keyboards from generating emoji characters?