Convert String to Emoji for SFCC XML Site Imports

convertStringToEmoji.js

/**
 * Convert String to Emoji
 * Most emoji's start with �
 * If you have these in your SFCC Site Import XML File, you might get an import error.
 *
 * @usage convertStringToEmoji('��') => 🙂
 * @param {String} str Raw URL Encoded String
 */
function convertStringToEmoji(str) {
    // Regex matching either a surrogate or a character.
    var re = /&#(\d+);|([^&])/g;
    var match;
    var charCodes = [];

    // Find successive matches
    while (match = re.exec(str)) {
      if (match[1] != null) {
        // Surrogate
        charCodes.push(match[1]);
      }
      else {
        // Unescaped character (assuming the code point is below 0x10000),
        charCodes.push(match[2].charCodeAt(0));
      }
    }

    // Create string from UTF-16 code units.
    return String.fromCharCode.apply(null, charCodes);
}

Usage Instructions

For my use case, if I am doing a Site Import that has a validation error, I do the following:

1. Download and unzip the ZIP file
2. Open the XML file in a text editor ( on macOS TextEdit works well to open and search large files )
3. Search for � to see if that exists in the XML, if it does, that's an emoji
4. The emoji will be two encoded characters next to each other, e.g. ��
5. Copy both encoded characters, e.g. �� to do a find and replace
6. To get the converted emoji, I usually open Google Chrome and just paste that function into the Dev Console
7. Once you have the function in a browser, you can call it, e.g. convertStringToEmoji('��')
8. Take the emoji it output and use that as a replacement in your search
9. Repeat steps 3-8 until you do not have any more results for �
10. Once you are done, rezip the folder you unzipped and upload the file to be imported

This seems to fix all the issues with my imports. There are usually only a dozen or so, and most are the same, so it goes pretty quickly.

---

If you are using a browser, here is a clean function you can just paste in your Dev Console and press ENTER

function convertStringToEmoji(str) {
    var re = /&#(\d+);|([^&])/g;
    var match;
    var charCodes = [];
    while (match = re.exec(str)) {
      if (match[1] != null) {
        charCodes.push(match[1]);
      }
      else {
        charCodes.push(match[2].charCodeAt(0));
      }
    }
    return String.fromCharCode.apply(null, charCodes);
}

ℹ️ TIP: In Google Chrome, you can use their native copy function to copy the output of a function to your clipboard, so you can do something like this:

copy(convertStringToEmoji('��'))