Server issue Emoji Icons - Posting from iOS devices to Xenforo

Smooth

Active member
When posting using Emoji icons that are now standard in iOS5, they simply disappear from the post. This causes a knock on issue with our app add in that it causes parse errors.

Is there any possibility of having the ability to use Emoji icons in Xenforo?

Many thanks.
 
Where are the icons hosted? Locally on the device or on a site which is accessible via a URL?

Unless they can be embedded as with a normal image, you can't just drag and drop them from your device to the post area - they will have to be uploaded.

The other option is to create them as smilies, but you will have to select them from the editor.
 
Emoji used to be an iPhone add-on keyboard under IOS4, which could be installed via the Emoji app. I don't have it on IOS5 on my 3GS, so it must be a feature for the iPhone 4S onwards. It installs itself as an extra keyboard and uses it's own character codes for smileys.

This isn't a bug with Xenforo as much as a limitation of the icons and the way they are used. Someone else may be able to correct me or point out otherwise, but I've never been able to use Emoji icons/smileys on any app apart from iMessage/SMS, where I think they are attached to the message as an MMS image.
 
Emoji used to be an iPhone add-on keyboard under IOS4, which could be installed via the Emoji app. I don't have it on IOS5, so it must be a feature for the iPhone 4S onwards.

This isn't a bug with Xenforo as much as a limitation of the icons and the way they are used. Someone else may be able to correct me or point out otherwise, but I've never been able to use Emoji icons/smileys on any app apart from iMessage/SMS, where I think they are attached to the message as an MMS image.
I'm pretty sure you're right. iOS just gets the basic text area for posting (or it should), which means that the emojis are probably not being sent through to the server at all.
 
Emoji used to be an iPhone add-on keyboard under IOS4, which could be installed via the Emoji app. I don't have it on IOS5 on my 3GS, so it must be a feature for the iPhone 4S onwards. It installs itself as an extra keyboard and uses it's own character codes for smileys.

This isn't a bug with Xenforo as much as a limitation of the icons and the way they are used. Someone else may be able to correct me or point out otherwise, but I've never been able to use Emoji icons/smileys on any app apart from iMessage/SMS, where I think they are attached to the message as an MMS image.

Agreed Phil. The emoji's can be used in twitter, instagram etc too.

The emoji icons are a standard part of ios 5 for all devices that can run the os (not just the 4S - I just tried on a virgin iphone 4) - you can access them by opening settings>general>keyboards>international keyboards>add new keyboard> emoji. Lots of people who use iDevices have this switched on and try to use them in Xenforo. I completely understand it is not a major need, but as a result of Xenforo not accepting them, it causes the parse error whenever someone tries to use it with our App.
 
Alternatively, if the emojis are outside the "basic multilingual plane" of UTF-8, then MySQL can't support them.
 
Without translating them back to something else, nope unfortunately not. (Well, there is another collation that may work, but I don't know if most people even have it.)
 
Code:
Error Info
Zend_Db_Statement_Mysqli_Exception: Mysqli statement execute error : Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x98\x84\xF0\x9F...' for column 'message' at row 1 -/homepages/46/d88575212/htdocs/MobiXen/library/Zend/Db/Statement/Mysqli.php:214
Generated By: Fastcomet, 25 December 2011
Stack Trace
#0 /homepages/46/d88575212/htdocs/MobiXen/library/Zend/Db/Statement.php(297): Zend_Db_Statement_Mysqli->_execute(Array)
#1 /homepages/46/d88575212/htdocs/MobiXen/library/Zend/Db/Adapter/Abstract.php(479): Zend_Db_Statement->execute(Array)
#2 /homepages/46/d88575212/htdocs/MobiXen/library/Zend/Db/Adapter/Abstract.php(574): Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract->query('INSERT INTO `xf...', Array)
#3 /homepages/46/d88575212/htdocs/MobiXen/library/XenForo/DataWriter.php(1500): Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract->insert('xf_post', Array)
#4 /homepages/46/d88575212/htdocs/MobiXen/library/XenForo/DataWriter.php(1489): XenForo_DataWriter->_insert()
#5 /homepages/46/d88575212/htdocs/MobiXen/library/XenForo/DataWriter.php(1291): XenForo_DataWriter->_save()
#6 /homepages/46/d88575212/htdocs/MobiXen/library/ForumRunner/ControllerPublic/Thread.php(367): XenForo_DataWriter->save()
#7 /homepages/46/d88575212/htdocs/MobiXen/forumrunner/include/general_xenforo.php(181): ForumRunner_ControllerPublic_Thread->actionPostReply()
#8 /homepages/46/d88575212/htdocs/MobiXen/forumrunner/include/post.php(21): route_request('ForumRunner_Con...', 'PostReply')
#9 [internal function]: do_post_reply()
#10 /homepages/46/d88575212/htdocs/MobiXen/forumrunner/request.php(75): call_user_func('do_post_reply')
#11 {main}
Request State
array(3) {
  ["url"] => string(46) "http://www.mobitog.com/forumrunner/request.php"
  ["_GET"] => array(0) {
  }
  ["_POST"] => array(7) {
    ["frp"] => string(2) "ip"
    ["frv"] => string(5) "1.5.9"
    ["poststarttime"] => string(10) "1324776008"
    ["cmd"] => string(10) "post_reply"
    ["threadid"] => string(4) "3522"
    ["message"] => string(92) "Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all my Mobifriends!!
 
[ATTACH]6528[/ATTACH]
 
"
    ["sig"] => string(35) "Sent from my iPhone4S using MobiTog"
  }
}

Just after the Happy Christmas message, there are two emoji icons that have been posted (but obviously Xen has stripped them from this post - and by copy and pasting the above into textedit or similar from the original error log they appear) - does the sql error code confirm Mike? Thank you so much for your assistance sir.
 
Doh :( Does this mean end of the line for problem? I see the thread has been switched to server issue - can we do anything with our hosts? I seem to recall we are on a fairly recent MySQL version...

Thanks again Mike. Appreciated sir.
 
It would require database and code modifications. With our current system requirements, utf8mb4 isn't even going to be available on many systems.
 
I've just found this thread, would mapping the emoji to ascii instead work?

Now that it's pretty much a standard keyboard on all mobile devices it would be good to figure out a solution as users are using them. Probably more so now that when you click the smiley face icon the smileys appear at the bottom of the text box. This requires a lot of odd scrolling up and down on mobile devices which isn't completely intuitive. Or at least, less intuitive than just switchign to the emoji keyboard mid flow and using that instead

I've created a suggestion for better emoji support. If anyone would like it, please like the first post in order to vote to try and find a solution.

https://xenforo.com/community/threa...bmissions-with-equivalent-forum-smiley.88643/

@king8084
@Smooth
 
It would require database and code modifications. With our current system requirements, utf8mb4 isn't even going to be available on many systems.
Mike, just to clarify - converting to utf8mb4 would help then? It shouldn't effect anything negatively to go ahead and do that now correct?

EDIT:
So far - so good
Screen Shot 2015-01-04 at 10.38.04 AM.webp
 
Last edited:
elaborate? i'm not sure what you've accomplished -- is that simply a smilie list accessible from the forum post, or true mobile emoji support?
Elaborate?
Modified the collation to utf8mb4_general_ci to see if it would allow smilies.. but there is code change needing to be done on the back end to so I've changed back to utf8_general_ci to be on the safe side since Mike never responded on whether it would negatively effect it.
 
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