Saving Emoji characters to Appian Cloud MySQL database

Another thing very much worth investigating is how those emoji got into the title in the first place. It's unlikely someone would intentionally go through all the trouble of adding one to legitimate business data, but very likely that an alternate program would automatically convert a string of characters into the emoji in question.

I can't mention the number of times I've tried typing a code snippet into Skype and it's produced an Angry Face or Winking face when I actually wanted it to preserve the punctuation. Just imagine what it might produce with Javascript like this: var total = x^3>(a);) It's a particular pain point with JIRA, that won't let me punctuate the way I want without making things bold or red or whatever. Just let me add punctuation without doing weird stuff unless I tell you.

Faced with your situation, I'd want to know what program the user was using to create the string, and what key combination (such as ;)) that could produce the emoji. Since that wasn't the intent, you could use the code() function on incoming characters, and if you find one of the problem ones translate them into the original intended sequence of characters.

Alternatively, there also might be a way to turn the auto-convert-to-emoji off on the other program.

Another thing very much worth investigating is how those emoji got into the title in the first place. It's unlikely someone would intentionally go through all the trouble of adding one to legitimate business data, but very likely that an alternate program would automatically convert a string of characters into the emoji in question.

I can't mention the number of times I've tried typing a code snippet into Skype and it's produced an Angry Face or Winking face when I actually wanted it to preserve the punctuation. Just imagine what it might produce with Javascript like this: var total = x^3>(a);) It's a particular pain point with JIRA, that won't let me punctuate the way I want without making things bold or red or whatever. Just let me add punctuation without doing weird stuff unless I tell you.

Faced with your situation, I'd want to know what program the user was using to create the string, and what key combination (such as ;)) that could produce the emoji. Since that wasn't the intent, you could use the code() function on incoming characters, and if you find one of the problem ones translate them into the original intended sequence of characters.

Alternatively, there also might be a way to turn the auto-convert-to-emoji off on the other program.

In our case it was actually in the name field returned by the Google Places API. It was somewhat unexpected to say the least.

...and yes, the immediate fix was to strip out the "illegal" characters with the following expression:

joinarray(
    char(
      reject(
        fn!exact,
        code(
          ri!place.name
        ),
        000000
      )
    )
)

Where 000000 is the unicode value of the offending character.