Remove Emoji characters from a string (PHP)

removeEmojis.php

// All credit goes to Ravikant Mane:
// Original comment: https://www.drupal.org/forum/support/post-installation/2013-07-16/removing-emoji-code#comment-11307453

// Preserve the question marks by converting them to '{%}' placeholders.
$string = str_replace("?", "{%}", $string);

// Encode to and from an encoding type that doesn't support emojis.
// This will convert all emojis to the same character, in this case "question mark".
$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, "ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8");
$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, "UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1");

// Replace all occurrences of the question mark character.
$string = str_replace(array("?", "? ", " ?"), array(""), $string);

// Recover our original, legit question marks.
$string = str_replace("{%}", "?", $string);

// Done!
return trim($string);