A Good ❤️ These Days Is Hard To Find

Working on the Twitter archive import has been interesting, learning more about emoji, character sets and moving data while keeping it intact.

I wanted to preserve the "likes" count for each Tweet so initially I just added it into the body of the message with a hear emoji.

I ran into trouble with getting the heart to display and eventually separated the "likes" from the main body which fixed the problem.

Once the "likes" were working the next problem I ran into was when emoji were actually part of the message. I went round and round in circles with this one until finally found that the problem was introduced when importing the original message into a variable, at this point the character sets were changing and the emoji lost!

Going through this import is a real lesson in how the Internet changed over the 14 years I had a Twitter account.

When I started using Twitter in 2007, emoji did not have a universal character representation!

My first real emoji use was in September 2016

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Tags:Twitter, Import, Emoji

This update was first written by Darren Wall
on Sunday 2nd Nov 2025.
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