Discord.js: Emoji's display as garbled text on older clients

[tenleftfingers]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Some clients interpret emoji's as gibberish. Could the alt-text description be displayed instead? I realise this may be a client-side issue but until I ask here I won't know.

Describe the ideal solution
I don't know if it's possible, but for older clients like WookieChat on Amiga, it would be great if they could be either detected and sent the alt-text instead.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Is there a way to send something that older clients will not display as garbled text?

Additional context
Emoji's display fine on webchat and modern terminal clients. But on older clients, the red car displays like this:

[appellation]

How is this an issue with Discord.js? Is this a bot using Discord.js that is attempting to send a custom emoji?

We do not support user account automation or custom clients.

[Throne3d]

This issue came from https://github.com/reactiflux/discord-irc/issues/192#issuecomment-430361174, and I think there's been a misunderstanding in what exactly the request is.

Currently, if a text message in a discord channel includes a (non-custom) emoji, discord.js preserves the Unicode emoji in the message content. This is good behavior – you wouldn't want to convert the emoji into a textual equivalent without being asked to, it makes sense that you don't – but, as far as I know, the library provides no way to then convert the emoji into a textual equivalent on demand. This means that, in the specific case of discord-irc, we convey the emoji as an emoji into the IRC channels we're dealing with, which fails to render on lots of clients, because we don't have the text-to-emoji mapping that Discord uses.

Ideally, discord-irc would be able to ask discord.js for a version of the message's content which has the emojis replaced with one of the codes used to generate it (e.g. :thumbsup:, instead of the thumbs-up emoji). This seems like it could be within scope of the discord.js library, given that the desktop Discord app shows strings like this on hover (that is, if you write :thumbsup: in a message, and then hover over the emoji in the resulting message, Discord will show the text :thumbsup:).

[appellation]

similar to #1712

[Throne3d]

Oh, hm, I guess that answers the question that it's not really in scope, then – do you know where Discord gets its text-emoji mapping from, by any chance?

[appellation]

I would recommend the package referenced in 1712 (node-emoji). I don't know how Discord specifically does it.