Regex to find emoji names with colon and skintone

Question

I'm using EmojiMart for my parser.

I've seen this related question but it seem to be different from mine.

So I need to return the emoji names or :code: for them to be able to decode it.

So example I have this text:

:+1::skin-tone-6::man-pouting:Hello world:skin-tone- 
6:lalalalla:person_with_pouting_face: :poop::skin-tone-11: mamamia 
:smile: :skin-tone-6:

It should match the whole :+1::skin-tone-6: and not a separate :+1:, :skin-tone-6:: - only if there’s no space between them. (notice the space between :smile: and :skin-tone-6: )

Conditions:

It should only match the :code::skintone: if skintone is 2-6

If I do str.split(regex) this is my expected result (array):

- :+1::skin-tone-6:
- :man-pouting:
- Hello world
- :skin-tone-6:
- lalalalla
- :person_with_pouting_face: 
- :poop:
- :skin-tone-11: 
-  mamamia 
- :smile: 
- :skin-tone-6:

Answer 1

You may use String#split() with the

/(:[^\s:]+(?:::skin-tone-[2-6])?:)/

regex. See the regex demo.

Details

• : - a colon
• [^\s:]+ - 1+ chars other than whitespace and :
• (?:::skin-tone-[2-6])? - an optional sequence of
  • ::skin-tone- - a literal substring
  • [2-6] - a digit from 2 to 6
• : - a colon.

JS demo:

var s = ":+1::skin-tone-6::man-pouting:Hello world:skin-tone-6:lalalalla:person_with_pouting_face: :poop::skin-tone-11: mamamia :smile: :skin-tone-6:";
var reg = /(:[^\s:]+(?:::skin-tone-[2-6])?:)/;
console.log(s.split(reg).filter(x => x.trim().length !=0 ));

The .filter(x => x.trim().length !=0 ) removes all blank items from the resulting array. For ES5 and older, use .filter(function(x) { return x.trim().length != 0; }).