9 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
9 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
This isn’t one emoji, its actually three.
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Sometimes, when you are typing on your phone and choose an emoji, a menu pops up asking for things like skin tone or gender. Instead of having hundreds of separate emojis for each of these possible combinations, computers use something called a zero width joiner to combine them.
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For example, the family emoji has hundreds of possible combinations for different genders, skin tones and number of people. Instead of having unique code points for each of these combinations, unicode defines a standard known as zero width joiner emoji sequences, which essentially means that multiple emojis are combined to form a specialized singular emoji.
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Zero width joiners are not just used for skin tone and gender, and make up many more emojis than you might think. Emojis like the rainbow flag and pirate flag emoji are made up of two different emojis each joined together with the zero width joiner code point and rendered as one emoji.
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The [[Unicode]] Consortium decides which emoji sequences are recommended for platforms to support, but in the end companies are able to decide which combinations of emojis are available on their platforms. |