Auto-detect terminal support for emojis

[peakschris]

On Windows, if I use default cmd with default font it doesn't support spinner emojis or ticks:

If I switch to cascadia mono, I get the spinners and ticks, but emojis don't work (this is cartwheel):

It's only if I run Windows Terminal that I get emojis and all:

is there some way in my code that I can detect these cases so I can avoid printing characters that will not display well?

[willmcgugan]

Frankly, no. I'd stick to Windows Terminal if you want to be sure emojis work.

[peakschris]

Thanks. Problem is we have thousands of users and whilst I can try to encourage them to use Windows terminal, I can't force it. Is there no way to detect this?

[willmcgugan]

I don't believe there is any reliable way of doing that. You may be able to sniff the environment, and make an educated guess, but it will be incorrect for a subset of your users.

[jfthuong]

You can't detect if the emoji is supported by the font used in the terminal...

However, one way to detect that you have UNICODE support is to check the encoding of STDOUT:

import sys

ASCII_ONLY = sys.stdout.encoding != "utf-8"

...

msg = "done!" if ASCII_ONLY else "done! 🤸🤸🤸"
print(msg)