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Unicode and Emojis

C++ code is usually in ASCII but many times you will want to send messages with Unicode and Emojis.

Standard Unicode Emojis and Characters​

Sleepy Discord should store text content using UTF-8. As such, to use Unicode, you can use C++'s u8 string literals.

String Literal

auto foo = u8"語";
sendMessage(channelID, u8"語");
note

The u8 string types are different in different C++ standards so auto is used and the above code may not work. More info here.

If you want to use ASCII in your source files, C++'s escape sequences also work. You'll want to look up the Unicode number for each character on a Unicode Character table. For example, 🔴 has the Unicode number U+1F534, so it's escape sequence is \U0001F534.

Unicode code points

auto foo = u8"\u8A9E"; //use little u for 4 digits
auto bar = u8"\u00B5"; //use zeros to fill up to 4 digits
auto fuu = u8"\U0001F534"; //use big U for 8 digits

Numeric Hex escapes

std::string foo = "\xE8\xAA\x9E"; //one \x for every byte in utf-8

C++20 and std::u8string​

In C++20, some of the above code will not work as the library currenty expects the std::string type instead of std::u8string.

Taking a look at the paper char8_t backward compatibility remediation (P1423), there are many ways to cast a u8 char array to a char array that has the same behavior of eariler C++ standards.

Here's an example of explicit conversions from the paper.

std::string from_u8string(const std::string &s) {
  return s;
}
std::string from_u8string(std::string &&s) {
  return std::move(s);
}
#if defined(__cpp_lib_char8_t)
std::string from_u8string(const std::u8string &s) {
  return std::string(s.begin(), s.end());
}
#endif

std::filesystem::path p = ...;
std::string s = from_u8string(p.u8string());  // C++17 or C++20

Custom Emojis​

If you want to insert Discord custom emojis into your text content, please prefer to the Discord API Message formatting reference.

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