How to prevent Unicode characters from rendering as emoji in HTML from JavaScript?

I'm finding Unicode for special characters from FileFormat.Info's search.

Some characters are rendering as the classic black-and-white glyphs, such as ⚠ (warning sign, \u26A0 or ⚠). These are preferable, since I can apply CSS styles (such as color) to them.

Others are rendering as newer cartoony emoji, such as ⌛ (hourglass, \u231B or ⌛). These are not preferable, since I cannot fully style them.

It appears that the browser is making this change, since I'm able to see the hourglass glyph on Mac Firefox, just not Mac Chrome nor Mac Safari.

Is there a way to force browsers to display the older (flat monotone) versions to display?

Update: It seems (from comments below) there is a text presentation selector, FE0E, available to enforce text-vs-emoji. The selector is concatenated as a suffix without space onto the character's code, such as ⌛︎ for HTML hex or \u231B\uFE0E for JS. However, it is simply not honored by all browsers (eg Chrome and Edge).

Append the Unicode variation selector character for forcing text, VS15, ︎.
This forces the previous character to be rendered as text rather than as an Emoji Symbol.

<p>🔒&#xFE0E;</p>

Result: ︎

Learn more at: Unicode symbol as text or emoji

I had a Unicode character in the content of a span::before, and I had the font-family of the span set to "Segoe UI Symbol". But Chrome used "Segoe UI Emoji" as the font to render it.

However, when I set the font-family to "Segoe UI Symbol" explicitly for the span::before, rather than just for the span, then it worked.

For a CSS-only solution to prevent iOS displaying emojis, you can use font-family: monospace which defaults to the text variant of the glyph rather than the emoji variant:

<p>Normal character: ↩</p>
<p>Monospace character: <span style="font-family: monospace">↩</span></p>

If your primary concern is forcing monochromatic display so the emoji don't stand out from the text too much, CSS filters, either alone or in combination with the Unicode variation selector, may be something you want.

p.gscale { 
  -webkit-filter: grayscale(100%);
  filter: grayscale(100%);
}
a {
  color: #999;
  -webkit-filter: grayscale(100%) sepia(100%) saturate(400%) hue-rotate(170deg);
   filter: grayscale(100%) sepia(100%) saturate(400%) hue-rotate(170deg);
}

You've now got emoji display on lockdown.

<p>External Link: <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/party-hard">celebrate 🎉</a></p>

Unlike the variation selector, it shouldn't matter how the emoji are rendered, because CSS filters apply to everything. (I use them to grayscale PNG-format "link type" icons on hyperlinks that have been modified to point to the Wayback Machine.)

Just mind the caveat. You can't override a parent element's filter in a child, so this technique can't be used to grayscale a paragraph, then re-colorize the links within it. 

...still, it's useful for situations where you're either going to be making the whole thing a hyperlink or disallowing rich markup within it. (eg. titles and descriptions)

However, this won't work unless CSS actually gets applied, so I'll give a second option which is more reliable in <title> elements than the Unicode variation selector (I'm looking at you GitHub. I don't like fake icons in my browser tabs):

If you're putting a user-provided string into a <title> element, filter out the emoji along with any bold/italic/underline/etc. markup. (Yes, for those who missed it, the standard does call for the contents of <title> to be plain text aside from the ampersand escapes and the browsers I tested all interpret tags within as literal text.)

The two ways I can think of are:

1. Directly use a manually-maintained regex which matches the blocks where the newest version of Unicode puts its emoji and their modifiers.
2. Iterate through the grapheme clusters and discard any which contain recognized emoji codepoints. (A grapheme cluster is a base glyph plus all the diacritics and other modifiers which make up the visible character. The example I link to uses Python's regex engine to tokenize and then the emoji package for the database, but Rust is a good example of a language where iterating grapheme clusters is quick and easy via a crate like unicode-segmentation.)

None of the other solutions worked for me but I eventually found something that did courtesy of css-tricks. In my use case, I was adding a link symbol at the end of each markdown header for direct linking to sections within articles but the emoji symbol looked a bit distracting. The following code allowed me to make the emoji look like a plain symbol and then switch back to looking like an emoji when hovered over which was perfect for my use case. If you just want to make the icon look more like a symbol just change the text-shadow hexadecimal color to #000 as shown in the second example.

.direct-link {
  color: transparent;
  text-shadow: 0 0 #dbe2ec;
}

.direct-link:hover {
  color: inherit;
}

<h3>Blog Subheading<a href='#' class="direct-link">🔗</a></h3>

   .direct-link {
      color: transparent;
      text-shadow: 0 0 #000;
    }

    <h3>Blog Subheading<a href='#' class="direct-link">🔗</a></h3>

Android fonts are not rich as you may expect. Font files don't have these exotic glyph and Android has a hack for few characters without glyph. They are replaced with icons.

So solution is to integrate the site with a web font (woff). Create new font file with FontForge and pick required glyph from free serif TTF for example. Every glyph takes 1k. Generate woff file.

Prepare simple CSS to import the custom font family.

style.css:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Exotic Icons';
  src: url('exotic-icons.woff') format('woff');
}

.exotic-symbol-font {
    position: relative;
    top: 1px;
    display: inline-block;
    font-family: 'Exotic Icons';
    font-style: normal;
    font-weight: normal;
    line-height: 1;

    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
    -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
}

index.html file:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet"></head>
    <title>Test custom glyphs</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <table>
      <tr>
        <td class="exotic-symbol-font">
          	😭 ☠ &#x2660; a  g
        </td>       
      </tr>
    </table>
  </body>
</html>

Google Chrome, desktop version 75, seems to disambiguate its approach to rendering Unicode characters based on the first Unicode escape it encounters while loading a page. For instance, when parsed as the first HTML Unicode escape in a page source, and having no emoji equivalent, ⏷ seems to clarify to Chrome that the page contains escapes not to be rendered as emoji.

Expanding upon ssokolow's answer, using a filter is nice and at least makes the contours visible instead of using a simple font, but converting an RGB color into a sequence of CSS filters is very hard when you want to use a specific color.

A better (although quite wordy) option is to use the <feColorMatrix> SVG filter. Combined with the grayscale filter and the data URI scheme, you can represent the color via RGB and in-line CSS:

.violet {
  color: white;
  filter: grayscale(100%) url("data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'><filter id='f'><feColorMatrix type='matrix' values='0.78 0 0 0 0  0 0.082 0 0 0  0 0 0.522 0 0  0 0 0 1 0'/></filter></svg>#f");
}

Unfortunately, you cannot interpolate the URL with data (taken from attributes or variables), but at least you don't have to calculate CSS filters from RGB.

If none of the other answers work for you, it's possible you have one or more of these fonts in your font stack (as was the case for us):

• Segoe UI Emoji
• Apple Color Emoji

These are included in a number of commonly used font stacks, like the Github font stack if I'm not mistaken.

My specific version of the problem

My site is using the ◀︎ (BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE) and similar characters in CSS pseudo-elements (::after and ::before) to indicate the current item in a list.

In my tests, I always used the triangle character and the variation selector 15 together. First I was using both a webfont from Google Fonts and a font installed on the device that should both have contained the glyphs for those characters, but for some reason, this assumption must have been wrong. I also tried different subsets on Google Fonts, to no avail: Two of my android devices with Google Chrome and Samsung Internet (Chromium) always rendered the emoji instead of the text glyph.

My solution

My solution was to download the latest WOFF of the Gnu Free Font (which I knew to contain glyphs for those characters), include it in my project, and define it using @font-face:

@font-face {
  font-family: "Free Sans";
  src: url("/site/static/fonts/FreeFont/FreeSans.woff") format("woff");
}

Then, to set the styles for my pseudo elements:

span.current::after {
  font-family: "Free Sans", $universal-font-family ! important;
}

Discussion

I'm not yet sure about the performance impact of using that 786K extra font just for those few characters. If that becomes a problem, it should be possible to use a stripped-down custom font with just those characters instead.

I dont know of a way to turn off the emoji type rendering. Usually I use an icon font such as font awesome or glyphicons (comes with Bootstrap 3).

The benefit of using these over the unicode characters is that

1. you can choose from many different styles so it fits the design of your site;
2. they are consistent across browsers (if you ever tried doing a unicode star character, you'll notice it's different in IE vs other browser);
3. also, they are fully stylable, like the unicode characters you're trying to use.

The only downside is that its one more thing for the browser to download when they view your page.

For me on OSX the solution was to set font-family to EmojiSymbols

None of the solutions above worked for the "Emoji for Google Chrome" Extension.

So as a workaround I made a screenshot of the Unicode Character 'BALLOT BOX WITH CHECK' (U+2611) and added it as image with php:

 $ballotBoxWithCheck='<img src="pics/U2611.png" style="height:11px;margin-bottom:-1px">'; # &#9745; or /U2611

See: https://spacetrace.org/man_card.php?tec_id=21&techname=multi-emp-vessel