Topic
Understanding Unicode
By: Evan Hahn
Date: May 9, 2024, 7:45 p.m.
The farmer emoji (👩🏾🌾) is a bit of a mystery.
In Python, its length is 4.
Same in Ruby. In JavaScript, its length is 7. It's 15 in Go and 12 in Java. There's just one character here...shouldn't they all have the same length: 1?
To understand this madness, you need to understand a little about Unicode. Many developers, myself included, get intimidated by Unicode. What's "UTF-8"? What's a "code point"? What does "U+1F937" mean?
In this talk, I'll try to answer these questions so that the next time someone gets confused by the length of the farmer emoji, you can help.