I like this feature (and I've needed it myself more than once ... I agree with what you said about regexes).

What I don't like is "hacking" this feature as a special non-real locale. This is a convention that developers must learn, so it makes it a bit more difficult. I wonder if we could add a removeEmojis() method in String component or any other method somewhere. Thanks.

i'd still be in favor of String integration, u($s)->stripEmoji()->toString()

i'd still be in favor of String integration, u($s)->stripEmoji()->toString()

That'd be 👎 on my side. I don't see why this specific translit rule would deserve such an important place.

i assumed our removeEmoji() removed emoji, but in fact it transliterates them to codes 🤦 (based on https://github.com/aaronpk/emoji-detector-php)

nevertheless i still think controlling the emoji at String level is nice to have

Thank you @fancyweb.