Emoji Support

Intro

Using emoji in your bot tends to make things a bit less robotic. Here is how you can accomplish that with Tourmaline.

Emoji Keyboard

Of course one of the best ways to include emojis in your messages is to just use an emoji keyboard and paste the raw emoji into your messages. Crystal is UTF8 compatible and won't freak out.

send_message(message.chat.id, "Hello world 🌎")

emoji.cr

Luckily there is also a great port of Emoji for Python called emoji.cr. With it you can easily use the same emoji shortcodes Github uses to include emoji in your messages.

require "emoji"

# bot definition...

send_message(message.chat.id, Emoji.emojize("Hello world :earth_americas:"))

Since emoji.cr uses regex to find and replace shortcodes with emoji, it would be a good idea to put any emoji messages into a constant so that it's not finding and replacing that shortcode every time.