Hello, fellow Coil community. I usually post links straight from my blog posts. However, I created a blog post with emojis in the title which was also placed in the URL of said post.

Did you know emojis can be used in URLs?

I really love this fact. However, it does have it's issues. For instance, some websites can't properly decode emojis since they use UTF8MB4 encoding, and not every website has their database set up properly for this. It's mainly old websites that continue to have this issue and new websites less so.

However, Coil doesn't seem to like them when I'm linking a post. This is the error I am currently seeing...

Hopefully, you can see in that image that the link shows “%f0%9f%91%80” and not 👀. This is because it's the decoded text of that emoji. This usually happens when you copy and paste an emoji from your desktop PC. If I visit that URL, then my blog is clever enough to redirect to the correct post. However, I think that the redirect is partially to blame. A redirect won't carry the “monetization” meta tag which is used to monetise blog posts.

My next thought was to delete said text and replace it with the proper encoded emoji.

Curious... As you can see from the above screenshot, when I change it to the correct emoji, I still get the same error. This is me fairly stumped since no redirect should happen, and it should pick up the tag. I have viewed the source on the said blog post, and it is definitely there.

Is there anyone in the Coil team who could look into this? If it's something that can't be fixed, then no worries. I can create a written post here and link to the original. 😊

For anyone that's interested in the blog post I'm talking about then you can take a look here. Have a good weekend all.