Integrating Emoji Support in Laravel Applications with Laravel Emoji Package

In today's social media‑driven environment, emojis are ubiquitous, and developers often need to provide them in web applications for user comments and interactions.

While PHP 5 can handle Unicode emojis using complex JSON decoding, PHP 7 offers simpler syntax such as <?php echo "\u{1F60E}"; , yet this approach is not very readable.

The Laravel Emoji package offers a clean solution for Laravel applications, allowing developers to work with emojis through a convenient facade.

Installation

Requirements: PHP 7.0+ (or HHVM 3.3+), Composer.

Add the dependency to composer.json :

"unicodeveloper/laravel-emoji": "1.0.*"

Run composer install or composer update to install the package.

Register the service provider in config/app.php providers array:

Unicodeveloper\Emoji\EmojiServiceProvider::class

And add the facade alias:

'aliases' => [<br/> ...<br/> 'Emoji' => Unicodeveloper\Emoji\Facades\Emoji::class,<br/> ...<br/>]

Usage

After installation, use the Emoji facade to retrieve emojis:

Emoji::findByAlias("kissing_heart");

Emoji::findByName("sunglasses");

Emoji::findByUnicode("\u{1F60A}"); // displays 'blush'

For a full list of supported emojis, refer to the original article linked at the end of the guide.