Emoji under the hood

tonsky.me

A fascinating and enlightening dive into how emoji works:

To sum up, these are seven ways emoji can be encoded:

  1. A single codepoint 🧛 U+1F9DB
  2. Single codepoint + variation selector-16 ☹︎ U+2639 + U+FE0F = ☹️
  3. Skin tone modifier 🤵 U+1F935 + U+1F3FD = 🤵🏽
  4. Zero-width joiner sequence 👨 + ZWJ + 🏭 = 👨‍🏭
  5. Flags 🇦 + 🇱 = 🇦🇱
  6. Tag sequences 🏴 + gbsct + U+E007F = 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿
  7. Keycap sequences * + U+FE0F + U+20E3 = *️⃣