Add a .extend(...) option to expand upon the built-in dictionary

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Forking @bigpay-ali's https://github.com/omnidan/node-emoji/pull/132#discussion_r1368079440:

Hello beautiful humans, I love what you did with this lib and thank you for providing this library for developer like me to build on top of it, is there a way we can get this fix merged? I desprately need some emojis which are missing from your lib. Maybe we can add a .extend(":emoji-code","✅") function, just in case some emojis are missing, developer can update it and make it searchable across project?

I like this idea. Even after the latest emojilib gets merged in, it's possible folks will want to add their own context/project-specific emoji extensions.

One difficulty with this is that right now, all node-emoji APIs are exported standalone: e.g. import { findByName } from "node-emoji". This new extension API would need to either:

• Modify the global-ish data used by the entire node-emoji module
• Create and return a new object with APIs

I'd lean towards the latter personally, as modifying global state is a worrisome thing to me.

My starting API proposal:

import { extend } from "node-emoji";

const emojiBank = extend({
  emojis: [
    { code: "yeehaw", emoji: "🤠" }
  ]
});

This differs from the original comment by being more explicit and open to later expansion, at the cost of extra verbosity.

[omnidan]

@JoshuaKGoldberg I really like the idea of making the library more extensible and it would likely solve a lot of issues people are having with the library not supporting certain codes for certain emoji. I also agree that returning a new object with the same APIs as node-emoji is the way to go. That way you could even have multiple instances of node-emoji that all resolve them differently. It is way more flexible and less prone to tricky bugs that can arise from modifying the global state of the library.

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

One month and no additional inputs - marking as accepting PRs! 🚀

Note that this probably isn't a trivial change. It'll require making all sort of stuff in node-emoji per-instance.

[lucasvieceli]

I quickly implemented a solution that updates the global state, but I'm wondering if anyone knows a way to create a new instance without having to modify the entire library?