What is best way to send emoji to sendInput action?

[krave1986]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

Open vscode to edit the settings.json file.
Locate "actions" property in json file and add this one:

      {
            "command": {
                "action": "sendInput",
                "input": "\"🚀\""

            },
            "keys": "ctrl+l"
        }

What I need to do to print emoji would be

        {
            "command": {
                "action": "sendInput",
                "input": "\"`u{1F680}\"\r"
            },
            "keys": "ctrl+l"
        }

Is it the best way to set emoji as argument of sendInput action? Or is there any better way to do that?

[DHowett]

The correct way to input an emoji depends on what you are doing. The first one works fine for sending the rocket emoji 🚀 with " on either side. The second one works fine for sending the character code of the rocket emoji in PowerShell's unicode escape format also wrapped in ". Both of those are different from sending the rocket emoji on its own.

What are you trying to do, and what's happening?

Is this the same report as #8808?

[krave1986]

For this issue here, I would like to edit settings.json mostly within vscode which supports emoji well. So as to my use case, I just want to print emoji by pressing a shortcut key. I thought sendInput action could be my solution. While doing this, I found that I am not able to simply copy 🚀 and paste it into vscode to finish the job. Instead, I have to convert 🚀 into, like you mentioned, PowerShell's unicode escape format `u{1F680} and wrap it with " to make it work.

Is it possible to get rid of the convertion step?

For #8808 , I want copy 🚀 and paste it into terminal.
What I desire is:

What I got is:

[zadjii-msft]

Oh so the real problem here is that fundamentally, the console doesn't support emoji input currently. See #190, #1503. So even if the Terminal knows how to handle emoji correctly, the underlying console is going to mangle them before powershell/cmd has a chance to read them and display them.

/dup #190
/dup #1503

[ghost]

Hi! We've identified this issue as a duplicate of another one that already exists on this Issue Tracker. This specific instance is being closed in favor of tracking the concern over on the referenced thread. Thanks for your report!

[krave1986]

Hi, @zadjii-msft , could you please shed some light on my issue about sendInput ?

For this issue here, I would like to edit settings.json mostly within vscode which supports emoji well. So as to my use case, I just want to print emoji by pressing a shortcut key. I thought sendInput action could be my solution. While doing this, I found that I am not able to simply copy 🚀 and paste it into vscode to finish the job. Instead, I have to convert 🚀 into, like you mentioned, PowerShell's unicode escape format `u{1F680} and wrap it with " to make it work.

Is it possible to get rid of the convertion step?

Is there an easy way to use emoji in settings.json as input for sendInput action?

[zadjii-msft]

Not really - at the end of the day, the console is going to mangle the emoji in the input line. So you should be able to just have emoji directly in the file. However, that won't work today, because of the previously mentioned bugs. The console (and Terminal) can handle emoji output perfectly well, but emoji input doesn't work nearly as well.

[krave1986]

Got it. Thanks for the clarification.