How can I split a string containing emoji into an array?

The grapheme-splitter library that does just that, is fully compatible even with old browsers and works not just with emoji but all sorts of exotic characters: https://github.com/orling/grapheme-splitter You are likely to miss edge-cases in any home-brew solution. This one is actually based on the UAX-29 Unicode standart

JavaScript ES6 has a solution!, for a real split:

[..."😴😄😃⛔🎠🚓🚇"] // ["😴", "😄", "😃", "⛔", "🎠", "🚓", "🚇"]

Yay? Except for the fact that when you run this through your transpiler, it might not work (see @brainkim's comment). It only works when natively run on an ES6-compliant browser. Luckily this encompasses most browsers (Safari, Chrome, FF), but if you're looking for high browser compatibility this is not the solution for you.

Edit: see Orlin Georgiev's answer for a proper solution in a library: https://github.com/orling/grapheme-splitter

---

Thanks to this answer I made a function that takes a string and returns an array of emoji:

var emojiStringToArray = function (str) {
  split = str.split(/([\uD800-\uDBFF][\uDC00-\uDFFF])/);
  arr = [];
  for (var i=0; i<split.length; i++) {
    char = split[i]
    if (char !== "") {
      arr.push(char);
    }
  }
  return arr;
};

So

emojiStringToArray("😴😄😃⛔🎠🚓🚇")
// => Array [ "😴", "😄", "😃", "⛔", "🎠", "🚓", "🚇" ]

The modern / proper way to split a UTF8 string is using Array.from(str) instead of str.split('')