I really had problem encoding and decoding emojis from utf-8 to utf-16 and vice versa So I created this package to help me out. Hope you find it useful too :)

composer require hasanparasteh/emojiji

Example

$sampleU8 = "hello 🏦";
$sampleU16 = mb_convert_encoding("hello 🏦", "UTF-16");

echo 'UTF-16 -> UTF-8 encoded emoji: ' . \HP\Emojiji::to_utf_8($sampleU16) . PHP_EOL;
echo 'UTF8 -> UTF-16 encoded emoji: ' . \HP\Emojiji::to_utf_16($sampleU8) . PHP_EOL;