Removing emojis from variable

php, smarty

Solution

The emoji are encoded in the block U+1F300–U+1F5FF.

preg_replace('/\xEE[\x80-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]|\xEF[\x81-\x83][\x80-\xBF]/', '', $first_name)

this will strip those out

Problem

I'm using Smarty to pass in and display the contents of a `first_name` variable. Some users have Emoji characters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji) in their `first_name` and I am wondering how I can either a) conditionally not display a user's `first_name` if it contains emojis or b) filter out emoji characters from `first_name`. Can this be done with Smarty? Can it be done with PHP in Smarty?

Original source