I've got a couple sources that can probably explain it better than I can, but here's the gist:

• Walk through each file you want to read
• Walk through each line you want to read
• Replace emojis using RegEx

The tricky part seems to be defining the range of characters you want to replace. Most emoji are in a particular block of unicode, but there could be a few outliers particularly if you want to remove kaomoji.

Here's a Stack Overflow link where there's some discussion on what that range will be.

Here's a Python script that shows how you might do it for one file.

Good luck!

Any renamer can do this with a trivial regular expression. What have you tried so far?

See if the command line utility “detox” removes it. I use it in a bash file that tidies everything up for me before I do my daily backup.

Go to the directory you want to clean up and type:

detox *

If you don't want to clean up everything, you can limit it. For example, if I only want to clean up PDF files, I'd do:

detox *.pdf

Detox replaces all the ugly characters with underscores. I personally hate underscores for most everything and use dashes instead. So after detox runs I also run:

rename ‘y/_/-/’ *

Then, because I want every file named only with lowercase letters, I also run:

rename ‘y/A-Z/a-z/’ *

(edit to remove duplicate info)