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.