Remove emojis from a string with regex

Removing emojis is a common pre-processing step for plain-text storage, SMS gateways, or terminal output. Here's how to do it in three languages.

The basic approach: match Unicode code points in the emoji blocks and replace with empty string.

JavaScript

function stripEmojis(s) {
  return s.replace(/[\u{1F300}-\u{1F9FF}\u{2600}-\u{27BF}\u{2300}-\u{23FF}]/gu, "");
}

stripEmojis("Hello 👋 world 🌍!");  // "Hello  world !"

The u flag is critical — without it, the brace-escape syntax doesn't work and surrogate pairs aren't handled correctly.

Python

import re

EMOJI_RE = re.compile(
    "["
    "\U0001F300-\U0001F9FF"
    "\u2600-\u27BF"
    "\u2300-\u23FF"
    "]",
    flags=re.UNICODE,
)

def strip_emojis(s):
    return EMOJI_RE.sub("", s)

print(strip_emojis("Hello 👋 world 🌍!"))

Go

import (
    "regexp"
    "fmt"
)

var emojiRE = regexp.MustCompile(\`[\x{1F300}-\x{1F9FF}\x{2600}-\x{27BF}\x{2300}-\x{23FF}]\`)

func stripEmojis(s string) string {
    return emojiRE.ReplaceAllString(s, "")
}

Edge cases this misses

The basic emoji blocks don't cover everything:

• Skin-tone modifiers (U+1F3FB–U+1F3FF) — append \u{1F3FB}-\u{1F3FF} to the class.
• Zero-Width Joiner sequences like 👨‍👩‍👧 — multiple emoji + ZWJ. The regex above strips each emoji but leaves orphan ZWJ characters.
• Flag emoji like 🇮🇳 — pairs of regional indicator symbols (U+1F1E6–U+1F1FF).
• Newer emoji blocks like Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A (U+1FA70–U+1FAFF).

For complete coverage, use a library: emoji in Python, emoji-regex in JavaScript, github.com/forPelevin/gomoji in Go.

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