iPhone emoticons insert into MySQL but become blank value

Question

We are developing an iPhone app that would send emoticons from iPhone to server-side PHP and insert into MySQL tables. I am doing the server-side work.

But after insert statement executed successfully, the inserted value become blank.
What I could insert into the field(varchar) correctly is text, but once including emoticons,
just the text could be inserted and the emoticons would be cut automatically.

Someone give me advice about set the field type to Blog so that it could store image data.
But the inserted value is not always including emoticons case and size is small.

*I am using mysql_real_escape_string for inserting value.

Answer 1

Most iOS emojis use code points above the Basic Multilingual Plane of the Unicode table. For example, 😄 (SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES) is at U+1F604.

Now, see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-unicode.html.

MySQL before version 5.5 only supports UTF-8 for the BMP, which includes characters between U+0000 and U+FFFF (i.e. only a subset of actual UTF-8; MySQL's utf8 is not real UTF-8). It cannot store the character at code point U+1F604 or other similar "high characters". MySQL 5.5+ supports utf8mb4 (actual UTF-8), utf16 and utf32, which are able to encode these characters. If you're using MySQL 5.5+, use one of these column character sets and make sure you're using the same charset for your connection encoding to/from PHP. If you are on MySQL < 5.5, you'll have to use a BLOB column type. That type stores raw bytes without caring about the "characters" in it. The downside is that you won't be able to efficiently search or index the text.

Answer 2

Some of the emoji characters work with older non-blobed mysql configurations because they are encoded using a 3 byte codepoint and mysql can store a 3 byte character. If you cannot upgrade mysql nor use blobs for whatever reason, you can scrub out 4 byte codepoints and keep the 3 byte ones.

If your computer has emoji capabilities, here is a list of the 3 byte iOS emoji characters:

☺❤✨❕❔✊✌✋☝☀☔☁⛄⚡☎➿✂⚽⚾⛳♠♥♣♦〽☕⛪⛺⛲⛵✈⛽⚠♨1⃣2⃣3⃣4⃣5⃣6⃣7⃣8⃣9⃣0⃣#⃣⬆⬇⬅➡↗↖↘↙◀▶⏪⏩♿㊙㊗✳✴♈♉♊♋♌♍♎♏♐♑♒♓⛎⭕❌©®™