Background
I run a fleet of static sites that publish new content every day, mostly unattended. One of the house style rules is simple: no emoji anywhere in our own copy.
That rule is impossible to hold by hand. A single site builds a few hundred HTML files, and emoji can slip into nav icons, button labels, <title>, the RSS feed, or JSON-LD (the JSON-formatted metadata embedded in a page to describe its structure to search engines). Nobody is going to review all of that before every deploy.
So I wrote emoji-lint, a check that exits 1 the moment it finds a single emoji. It sits in the pre-deploy gate, which means a failure stops that day's publish.
This post is not about the regex. It's about what happens when you put a failing check into real operation: you immediately discover the places where the rule must not apply.
