Displaying text with Emojis on Flutter

The Problem

As of now, unfortunately, Flutter uses the default Emojis supported on a given platform. Therefore, when building a cross-platform app you may face issues of Emojis showing on certain devices and not on others.

The Solution

The solution I settled for is to use a custom Emoji font such as Emoji One and RichText widget instead of the basic Text widget.

With this, you can simply have:

RichText(
  text: TextSpan(
    children: <TextSpan>[
      TextSpan(
        text: 'Hello',  // non-emoji characters
      ),
      TextSpan(
        text: ' ️\u200d', // emoji characters
        style: TextStyle(
          fontFamily: 'EmojiOne',
        ),
      ),
    ],
  ),
);

Generalized Solution

With this idea, we can even create a custom widget that given a string, builds a RichText object with all the TextSpans autocreated:

class EmojiText extends StatelessWidget {

  const EmojiText({
    Key key,
    @required this.text,
  }) : assert(text != null),
       super(key: key);

  final String text;

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return RichText(
      text: _buildText(this.text),
    );
  }

  TextSpan _buildText(String text) {
    final children = <TextSpan>[]; 
    final runes = text.runes;

    for (int i = 0; i < runes.length; /* empty */ ) {
      int current = runes.elementAt(i);

      // we assume that everything that is not
      // in Extended-ASCII set is an emoji...
      final isEmoji = current > 255;
      final shouldBreak = isEmoji
        ? (x) => x <= 255 
        : (x) => x > 255;

      final chunk = <int>[];
      while (! shouldBreak(current)) {
        chunk.add(current);
        if (++i >= runes.length) break;
        current = runes.elementAt(i);
      }

      children.add(
        TextSpan(
          text: String.fromCharCodes(chunk),
          style: TextStyle(
            fontFamily: isEmoji ? 'EmojiOne' : null,
          ),
        ),
      );
    }

    return TextSpan(children: children);
  } 
} 

Which can be used as:

EmojiText(text: 'Hello there:  ️\u200d');

This has the advantage of having the consistent support of Emojis on your app that you can control on different platforms.

The downside is that it will add some MBs to your app.

You can insert emoji in the text field through following way:

If you're on Mac, you can hit Control + Command + Space. Windows users can hit the "Windows key" + ; (semicolon).

Copy pasted the instruction from @Reso Coder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuUkq2cLZU&t=15s

I tested on mac and it works.

If you just want to include emoji in Text widget, you can copy emoji from somewhere else and paste it inside the text widget. I use GeteMoji to copy emojis.

See the Output Screenshot

CODE : See 8th Row.

Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Center(
        child: Container(
            alignment: Alignment.center,
            color: Colors.deepPurple,
            //width: 200.0,
            //height: 100.0,
            child: Text("Emoji  ",
                style: TextStyle(
                  fontFamily: 'Raleway',
                  fontSize: 40,
                  decoration: TextDecoration.none,
                  color: Colors.white

                ))));
  }

For full emoji compatibility (at least in android, not all emojis are supported in old OS versions) you can use the google free font Noto Color Emoji at https://www.google.com/get/noto/#emoji-zsye-color

• Add it to the fonts folder
• add in pubspec.yaml

    fonts:
    - family: NotoEmoji
      fonts:
        - asset: fonts/NotoColorEmoji.ttf
          weight: 400

• use with TextStyle

  Text("", TextStyle(fontFamily: 'NotoEmoji'))

When an emoji is not showing up, the issue is most likely the font you are using.

Before trying out an emoji font package, you can give the text field an empty string as fontFamily or try out the default font options packaged with flutter. This will prevent adding dependencies that are not needed.

for example this emoji was not showing on android with 'Product Sans' as fontFamily, i simply added an empty string and font family for the text field, and that fixed the issue.

Text('₦', TextStyle(fontFamily: ''))

You can easily use the fontFamily as a style to solve the problem I used it with the package

auto_size_text: ^2.1.0

AutoSizeText(
              lesson.FullExercise,
              textAlign: TextAlign.justify,
              style:TextStyle(
              fontFamily: 'EmojiOne',
              ),
            ),

Good note to mention If you want to store data in MySQL and the text contains Emojis you need to change the collection of the text to utf8mb4