Thank you, this appears to have fixed it! Using the following code the emoji is passed and displayed correctly on the websocket client. 
$text = encode( 'iso-8859-1', $text );
$text = decode( 'UTF-8', $text );
$conn->send_utf8( $text );

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In reply to Re^6: Encoding of emoji character by dcunningham
in thread Encoding of emoji character by dcunningham

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