Emoticons or icons

Hi,

The meta description or the description of the product can include emojis. You just need to add the icon's HTML code:
www.amp-what.com/unicode/search/icon

Hi,

It might be that you're testing with a 4 bytes UTF8 code. In that case, you need to change the collation of the hikashop_product table in the database.
Here is a thread with more information on this:
www.hikashop.com/forum/product-category-...ji-icons.html#303103

Hi,

Any 3 bytes emoji should work.
Here apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode you can see the bytes for each one. The number of slashes there is the number of bytes. So as ypou can see all the ones in the dingbat section will work:
apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode#block-2-dingbats
And you also have several in the uncategorized section:
apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unico...lock-5-uncategorized

You also have that list: unicode.org/Public/emoji/5.0/emoji-data.txt
most of them should work.

Otherwise, you have this page:
design215.com/toolbox/utf8-3byte-characters.php
It lists all the 3 bytes characters of UTF8. So all of them will work. However, many of them are not emojis. You'll find several hundreds of them.

Hi,

Your message was:

Briefly I have found that not all emojis work in the product description while they work ok in articles which would indicate it's an issue with the shop.
⚒ works but ?does not and neither does ?

The first icon is a 3 bytes emoji and the other two are 4 bytes emojis.

HikaShop already comes with Font Awesome support. It's been 10 years now. All the icons used by HikaShop on its frontend rely on it. If you removed font awesome from your Joomla frontend, the HikaShop icons on the frontend wouldn't display anymore. An emoji not displaying on the frontend has nothing to do with Font Awesome but the collation of the data in the database and how UTF8 works.

As stated on this thread:

Any 3 bytes emoji should work.

And the link to the other thread 6 years ago says:

From what I understand, the issue is a collation issue in your database.
emojipedia.org/balloon/ requires utf8mb4 encoding collation while HikaShop uses the utf8 encoding collation which only supports 3 bytes UTF8 code and emojipedia.org/balloon/ is a 4 bytes UTF8 code.
So you need to change the collation of the hikashop_category table via your phpmyadmin and then it will work fine in the category description.

So, changing the collation of the corresponding table in the database will allow for 4 bytes UTF8 emojis too. So if you have a problem with some emojis not supported, it's likely what you need to do.
The default collation of the tables of HikaShop is utf8_general_ci
The fact that we use the utf8_general_ci collation is for greater compatibility and legacy issues.
Change the collation to utf8mb4_general_ci via your PHPMyAdmin as recommended and your icons will be saved correctly in your database.

I don't think I was wrong with pointing you to the solution here.

Hi,

Thanks for the prompt response which is a bit more intelligible. You weren't wrong pointing me to a solution, you were wrong in assuming I would understand it. People like myself use CMSs and pay for solutions such as Hikashop because we are not coders. I have sufficient knowledge of html and css to create a rudimentary website but I've never dabbled with php and databases.

Sorry for that. I indeed assumed that you knew how to use PHPMyAdmin. This is often the case for people building websites with Joomla, even when they don't have any coding knowledge. Sorry again.

I have not, to the best of my knowledge, removed FA from my Joomla frontend, nor do I know how one would remove it. For clarity my interpretation of joomla frontend is the website that the public can see and the backend is the administration area that only admins can access. If your meaning is different please educate me.

And I'm not saying you did. I'm saying that if you were to do it, you would loose all the HikaShop icons on the frontend. Its just to say that HikaShop already supports FA. FA has nothing to do with your issue. HikaShop is already compatible with FA.

In my Joomla articles that display on the frontend all the FA icons display properly. It is only in the Hikashop product descriptions that they do not display, I also note that they do not display on this forum.

No, the emoji you provided as example as not FA icons. They are UTF8 emojis as I pointed in my previous message.

Now I have no idea what a database collation is and how one type is different from another so what assurances can you give me that changing it to utf8mb4 will not break something else. This is a concern for me as one of your devs stated 6 years ago that new installations would have utf8mb4 by default, that is how I interpret this "We won't change the encoding during updates but new installation would have the utf8mb4 encoding.", and I wonder why that has not happened.

We were looking into using utf8_mb4 6 years ago. And its because some users had issues with that change that we reverted the change in order to stick with utf8_general_ci.
However, in the vast majority of cases, changing the collation from utf8_general_ci to utf8mb4_general_ci won't create a problem.
If you're worried about the change, make a copy of the hikashop_product table before changing the collation of the table. That way, you can always revert the change if necessary by restoring the original hikashop_product table. However, normally, it shouldn't change anything besides allowing for support of UTF8 4 bytes emojis.

Assuming I decide to follow this advice how do I change the collation, I can access the DB via phpMyAdmin, and more importantly how would I change it back.

To change the collation of the table, you can follow the instructions on this video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=83kKIvFJX5E
To make a back of the hikashop_product table, you can follow the instructions on this video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0MR5dhTZgo
Once you change the collation, you don't need to revert it back, unless you find a problem with the change.