Not a bug Cannot search emojis

[Weppa333]

Affected version

2.1.2

Hello

Regarding emojis in thread titles, like in my test message

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/%F0%9F%A4%AE%F0%9F%A4%AE%F0%9F%98%91%F0%9F%98%AC%F0%9F%98%B0%F0%9F%98%B3.165668/

I noticed that emojis cannot be searched ( you cannot find that message here by typing the same emojis in the text box )

Just FYI.

Also, I'm suggesting that xenforo make support of emojis in thread titles (and username) optionnal with a checkbox in the ACP.

 

[Chris D]

Emoji being searchable is going to be down to the individual data handler. So in the normal case, either MySQL Full Text search or Elasticsearch.

In the first case, MySQL FT search likely doesn't work because we're still using MyISAM storage for that. Which kind of surprises me as I didn't have any reason to believe that we couldn't store emoji in those cases but indeed the table just totally rejects those characters (even though the tables should support them).

We may be able to re-assess that in the future as we may want to consider using InnoDB full-text search instead, though I believe this is a significant change.

From the Elasticsearch point of view, I believe this may be down to the ES analyzer. I'm not seeing anything conclusive but it's possible the version we're using here doesn't support searching emoji, though that may change in the future.

Overall, we're not going to make any changes here right now, though we'll keep it in mind for future improvements.