Python emoji search and replace not working as expected

Question

I am trying to separate emoji in given text from other characters/words/emojis. I want to use emoji later as features in text classification. So it is important that I treat eac

Answer 1

There are several issues here.

• There is no capturing groups in the regex pattern, but in the replacement pattern, you define \1 backreference to Group 1 - so, the most natural workaround is to use a backreference to Group 0, i.e. the whole match, that is \g<0>.
• The \1 in the replacement is not actually parsed as a backreference, but as a a char with an octal value 1 because the backslash in the regular (not raw) string literals forms escape sequences. Here, it is an octal escape.
• The + after the ] means that the regex engine must match 1 or more occurrences of text matching the character class, so you match sequences of emojis rather than each separate emoji.

Use

import re

text = "I am very #happy man but