How to print Emoji characters in your Java command-line application

31 March 2019

In general, you only have colors and font-weight to work with when you are in a regular terminal application. Using emoji chracters allows to use different visual markers than what we are noramlly used to.

See below for how it works in Java:

  1. Go to this index and find emoji to use. E.g. "Grinning Face" has UTF-16 code U+1F600.

  2. Go to fileformat.info and query for U+1F600.

  3. Click on the returned result and find the row "C/C++/Java source code"; which should show "\uD83D\uDE00".

  4. Put System.out.println("\uD83D\uDE00") into your Java application.

If you run this application in a terminal and the font supports it, you should see the grinning face 😀.