Emoji Code is my favorite thing I’ve built thus far.

In a nutshell it’s a web app that lets you translate normal sentences into pure encoded emojis and back.

For example, here’s “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” in Emoji Code:

📗🐨🔮 🍥💰🕗💊 😠👖 🍄👔👙🏃🙆 🐟💰😤📚🚪 🔕🌸🕗🐛😤🔧 🏇💊 👂😰🏥 👔😷💰📆🐛🚱

You can copy and paste that back into the translator to turn it back into English.

The original idea came from song about only communicating through emojis… I wondered if you could make that a reality and thought it’d be a fun project to work on.

It takes an input string, splits it into individual characters, and then a bunch of JavaScript translates it into emojis. I wrote a little script to take all valid emojis and distribute them throughout the necessary characters.

Each character can be one of six emojis, randomly selected, so translating the same sentence multiple times will give you completely different outputs. For example, here’s the JS object for “A”, and the program will pick one of these six emojis randomly when translating:

{"A":["🍆","🔼","🚚","📠","👒","📹"]}

Randomizing each individual character makes it difficult to learn to read Emoji Code. Despite the randomized emoji outputs, a given sentence will still translate back correctly. The program simply looks for the emoji and matches it to a character using a JSON dictionary:

"📹":"A"

The site itself is designed to be as mobile-friendly as possible (specifically for iOS devices as they have excellent native emoji support). Unfortunately you can’t access the clipboard through iOS Safari, but on desktops you can use Flash (unfortunately) to access the clipboard so users don’t have to manually copy.

I’m done with Emoji Code for now, as a web app it’s about as polished as it can be. I’d like to port it to iOS for all the advantages that being a native app would bring but I’ll have to learn iOS before that can happen.

👂🙈📏🙆💻🎂 📀📐📅 👹🎄👙💱👞🏭🕔 📪🔆

Check out the full code on my github if you’d like.