How to remove all instances of any emoji from a twitter post in Python 2.7

Question

I'm working on a project that gets tweets from twitter using tweepy and processes the text. The problem that I am having is that I can't have any emoji's, special characters, etc.. Unfortunately one of the libraries that I am using doesn't support python 3 so I have to use python 2.7. Is there any way to remove everything except the "human readable text". I have been using the ftfy library but I still get stuff like this:

• ∩┐╜∩┐╜

• φï░φîî∞▒ù

• ��

my code:

import tweepy
from ftfy import fix_text,fix_encoding
from requests.exceptions import ConnectionError
from requests.packages.urllib3.exceptions import ProtocolError,ReadTimeoutError
import time
import exceptions

consumer_key = '...'
consumer_secret = '...'

access_token = '...'
access_token_secret = '...'

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)



class MyStreamListener(tweepy.StreamListener):
    def on_connect(self):
        print 'Connected'
    def on_status(self, status):
        fixed_text = fix_text(fix_encoding(status.text)).encode('utf-8')
        print fixed_text
        return True
    def on_error(self, status):
        print status
        return False


running = True
while running is True:
    try:
        print 'Connecting'
        myStreamListener = MyStreamListener()
        myStream = tweepy.Stream(auth=auth,listener=myStreamListener)
        myStream.filter(track=['python'])
    except ConnectionError:
        print 'Connection Error: Waiting 10 seconds before retrying'
        time.sleep(10)
    except ProtocolError:
        print 'ProtocolError: Waiting 10 seconds before retrying'
        time.sleep(10)
    except ReadTimeoutError:
        print 'Read Timeout Error: Waiting 10 seconds before retrying'

note: this is just my test script to learn how to take tweets from twitter and print them

Answer 1

If it is returning something along the lines of bad character range then this code below should work.

import re
try:
    # UCS-4
    highpoints = re.compile(u'[U00010000-U0010ffff]')
except re.error:
    # UCS-2
    highpoints = re.compile(u'[uD800-uDBFF][uDC00-uDFFF]')