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+# emoji regex generator
+
+this is a small program i wrote to generate a size-optimized regular expression
+for matching emoji. i use this on a discord server (sorry) that has a channel
+for emoji-based polls. we set up the [YAGPDB bot](https://yagpdb.xyz) with some
+custom commands (which are limited to roughly ten thousand characters) to do
+so. since it's built roughly as a one-off tool for this, it outputs the
+language of the scripting system the bot uses, but this is mostly irrelevant.
+
+## usage
+
+```
+$ fennel make-regex.fnl > regex.txt
+```
+
+it reads a list of emoji from `emoji-test.txt`, which can be obtained from the
+unicode consortium. the code for generating the output is near the end of the
+file, and the configuration for how the regex is optimized (which is particular
+to the data set) is placed at the top.