Support emojis inside short links

[ayr-ton]

Summary

Today emojis are mostly UTF-8 chars, so is possible to put them in links like:

https://blog.rebrandly.com/add-emojis-to-short-links/

So, a great feature would be allowing UTF-8 chars inside the custom shortlink box and let the UTF-8 magic to happen. 🤸🏻‍♂️

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This requires changes in the database too, as current collation (utf8 instead of utf8mb4) does not support all emojis.

[acelaya]

Sounds like something nice to have.

I will investigate the effort required to implement this.

[acelaya]

Hey @ayr-ton, I'm afraid I have to move this out of v2.3.0

It's turning out way more complex than I anticipated. Currently, the reason for which emojis are not supported is because when you provide a custom slug, it is filtered and normalized, applying a regex which only allows a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and a few special characters which are valid for URLs, like ., _ or ~. Everything else is replaced by a dash (-).

In order to support emojis, the unicode sequences of all known emojis have to be added to this regular expression. I more or less figured that out, but the problem is that it has to be negated (at the end the regex defines what's allowed, and everything else needs to be replaced), and it's not working as expected.

I have also considered completely changing the approach, and allow any character in custom slugs but spaces, but that might potentially introduce some breaking change and nasty edge case that needs to be carefully tested.

Because of that I will delay this a bit more, to avoid blocking the release of v2.3 any further, and spend a bit more time testing/investigating afterwards.

[ayr-ton]

Thanks for all the details, @acelaya

Looking forward to future versions o/

[acelaya]

I have made some progress on supporting emojis in Shlink. Basically, I have simplified how custom slugs are processed, allowing any character but " " and "/". That effectively allows using emojis in the custom slug. More can be seen in #1318

However, there's still two other things to tackle.

• When persisiting emojis, there are som contexts in which there's a database error. It doesn't happen always, so I'm trying to find out what's the reason.
• When using an emoji as a custom slug, it is being URL-encoded somewhere, "breaking" it in some way. I'm investigating this too.

[acelaya]

Support for emojis fully implemented now 😎. It will be released with Shlink 3.0.0