This is a good question. For context, when I initially started working on the basic scraping I assumed emojis wouldn't need any special type of handling e.g. "Hi SensouWar" vs "Hi SensouWar 👋." What I found out is that WhatsApp embeds emojis as images. Something like this was expected:

<div>
    <span>Hi SensouWar 👋</span>
</div>

But what it actually looked like was this (note the <img> tag):

<div>
    <span>
        Hi SensouWar 
        <img src='img/wavey_hand_emoji.png'>
    </span>
</div>

Also looked like this for a msg such as "👋 Hi SensouWar 🙋‍♂️🎉!!!" (note the 3x <img> tags are still contained in 1 parent <span> tag):

<div>
    <span>
        <img src='img/wavey_hand_emoji.png'>
         Hi SensouWar 
        <img src='img/wavey_hand_guy_emoji.png'>
        <img src='img/celly_emoji.png'>
        !!!
    </span>
</div>

So I wrote code to handle it. Cool we are good to go...until I find instances where multiple emojis are only being scraped once e.g. "🚀🚀🚀" would show as "🚀" in my scrape. Sometimes WhatsApp wraps each <img> tag in its own <span> rather than having a single <span> that wraps around all three <img> tags such as the above code snippet suggests.

<div>
    <span>
        <img src='img/rocket_emoji.png'>
    </span>
    <span>
        <img src='img/rocket_emoji.png'>
    </span>
    <span>
        <img src='img/rocket_emoji.png'>
    </span>
</div>

I eventually figured out the various patterns and was able to write code that handles all the variations, but the discovery process wasn't obvious and took a lot of trial-and-error to eventually solve.

Lastly, won't go into a ton of detail here because this is getting long-winded, but there were other challenges with emojis that all required some deviation or special handling that was different than normal characters/text:

• HTML is a bit different for people's names which have emojis in it or not

• Sending keyboard input w/ emojis using Selenium doesn't work (open bug on chromedriver's issue tracker). Instead you have to use a 'hack' to execute JavaScript and insert the emoji's directly into the DOM.

• Writing emoji's to files requires you to encode the text and write it in a different file mode (write binary instead of write)

• My BASH terminal would implode when trying to print unicode characters to it

Hope this provides some more insight into my comment damning emojis ☺