We recently notice that URLs containing some emojis were resulting in some orders not being inserted in our system due to an encoding issue that was never a problem for us before. We solved the problem by using the PHP function for UTF-8 encoding.
The emojis that were causing the problem included:
❤️
🥰
This problem is related to another problem we fixed this week which resulted in records not being inserted if they included strings unless we encoded them using utf8_encode() before trying to insert it using WordPress’s WPDB class. That problem impacted most inserts and updates on all sites using any version of the PayDelete plugin while the emoji problem was only linked to a small percentage of content derived from Instagram posts hosted by social media aggregators.
If you’re want to play the blame game we suggest blaming Shigetaka Kurita for the scourge he unleashed back in the 1990s. If it were not for him you wouldn’t have to figure out what emojis mean to know what people are saying because they would still be required to say what they mean in English or some other real language.