javascript - How can I split a string containing emoji into an array?

Question

(You'll need Firefox or Safari to see the emoji in the code.)

I want to take a string of emoji and do something with the individual characters.

In JavaScript "?????????????".length == 13 because "?" length is 1, the rest are 2. So we can't do

var string = "?????????????";
s = string.split(""); 
c = [];
c[0] = s[0]+s[1];
console.log(c);

Answer 1

Edit: see Orlin Georgiev's answer for a proper solution in a library: https://github.com/orling/grapheme-splitter

---

Thanks to this answer I made a function that takes a string and returns an array of emoji:

var emojiStringToArray = function (str) {
  split = str.split(/([uD800-uDBFF][uDC00-uDFFF])/);
  arr = [];
  for (var i=0; i<split.length; i++) {
    char = split[i]
    if (char !== "") {
      arr.push(char);
    }
  }
  return arr;
};

So

emojiStringToArray("?????????????")
// => Array [ "??", "??", "??", "?", "??", "??", "??" ]