Emojis break instagram embed

Hello all,

This is not as much of a question as it is a bug that I found and how I worked around it. I would love to hear if anyone else has ran into this and if you have a different way of handling it.

So background,
since 3.5, you have been able to embed an instagram photo into a wordpress post just by single lining the instagram link. Example: https://instagram.com/p/tnZ6DfBjly/

The problem arises on single.php when the title of that instagram photo has no text, and only emoji’s (as the photo above does). I can inspect the element and i see the alt attribute looks like this:
alt=”
(unclosed double quotes)

My solution was to grab a function that would remove all emoji characters from $title which gets echoed into the alt attribute upon runtime.
function removeEmoji($text) {
$clean_text = “”;
// Match Emoticons
$regexEmoticons = ‘/[\x{1F600}-\x{1F64F}]/u’;
$clean_text = preg_replace($regexEmoticons, ”, $text);
// Match Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs
$regexSymbols = ‘/[\x{1F300}-\x{1F5FF}]/u’;
$clean_text = preg_replace($regexSymbols, ”, $clean_text);
// Match Transport And Map Symbols
$regexTransport = ‘/[\x{1F680}-\x{1F6FF}]/u’;
$clean_text = preg_replace($regexTransport, ”, $clean_text);
// Match Miscellaneous Symbols
$regexMisc = ‘/[\x{2600}-\x{26FF}]/u’;
$clean_text = preg_replace($regexMisc, ”, $clean_text);
// Match Dingbats
$regexDingbats = ‘/[\x{2700}-\x{27BF}]/u’;
$clean_text = preg_replace($regexDingbats, ”, $clean_text);
return $clean_text;
}
credit: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12807176/php-writing-a-simple-removeemoji-function

I added that function to the bottom of wp-includes/class-oembed.php
and added $title = removeEmoji($title); to line 512 of the same file

I tested the same photo afterwards and the alt attribute was empty and the post was no longer breaking.

Hope this helps someone else in the future.