Heh. In my code, I always (idiosyncratically, I admit) spell '\x20' as '\x20' (or even just as 0x20, if it's C), unless it's a part of a multicharacter string e.g. "Hello world!": it just feels wrong to have an empty space inside single quotes. Is it really just U+0020 in there? Is it supposed to be U+0020 there? Silly worries, I know, but I just don't like the way ' ' looks.
Edit: as demonstrated by this very comment.
Also I’m not even sure it was a good idea to put them in text. Emojis are a special case that breaks a lot. Now you have to worry about multiple colors, etc.
It is reasonable and worthwhile to encode some nonverbal information in it, and emojis have won the day.
Generally I agree with you, but in rare cases like the article that this one is meta-commentary to it might perhaps have been justifiable to allow it? I see the "slippery slope" risk though.
Neither are digits, or control characters, strictly speaking. We really shouldn't have been able to have CR and LF explicitly embedded in the text files.
Digits definitely are a form of text though. Unicode is for writing systems, which definitely includes writing numbers
Jury's still out on social media, but not definitely not emoji. Incontestable success story
The real problem is that the alphabets of certain writing systems are unbounded. Emojis are completely unbounded. That's the only reason to have concern with it in unicode. Unicode is a limited set by definition and emojis are an unbounded set.
The modern Western society is very occupied with the questions of racial and gender identity, and it is generally accepted in that society that this topic is "significant". And since it's that society that the Unicode Consortium is working within, this explains how you get six different colors of "man-pregnant" emoji in the world where there possibly haven't been six different-colored pregnant men.
I would like to stress that I am not arguing against the addition U+1FAC3 PREGNANT MAN or U+1FAC4 PREGNANT PERSON, there are good reasons to add these, but do we need mundane arbitrary everyday items line U+1FAA9 MIRROR BALL? I'd say no.
For example, this is the unicode sequence for bearded lady:
U+1F9D4 person with beard
U+200D zero width joiner
U+2640 female sign
U+1F930 pregnant person (woman is implied by lack of modifier)
U+200D zero width joiner
U+2642 male sign
Take, for example, the various skin colors for faces and persons: if emoji were a real ideographic script, the written representation would be a logograph combined with a determinative, not a set of distinct glyphs. The irony of course is that is exactly how it is encoded within Unicode (an emoji codepoint with a skin color modifier). But doing it this way is exactly why emoji is an illegitimate script: it does not represent any non-digital form of writing, and the emoji modifiers do not have any representation of themselves, neither visual nor audible. Nor is the modifier composable in the way that a real language would be: it does not modify animal colors, for example.
What about "fancy fonts" (foreign characters that look like latin letters)? Japanese / Chinese ideographs? Common pictograms like "stop sign?" Mathematical symbols?
People made emoticons out of ~100 printable ASCII characters. With thousands of "real" Unicode symbols available, they would have gone wild anyway.
As a person with accessibility needs, I'm honestly glad emojis exist. They at least carry semantic meanings (though some people do abuse them in ways inconsistent with those meanings), unlike random combinations of symbols that the internet community has agreed on.
Unicode's original self-declared mission was to encode all characters needed for written communication in the world.
Wikipedia once had a similar issue, where people used it to add all kinds of trivia and original research. There was a fight between the so called inclusionists and deletionists. The latter won and we now have strict guidelines that ensure everything in Wikipedia has to have strong relevant external validation.
In my opinion, the Unicode Consortium would have been well advised to follow Wikipedia's example. If they really only had added characters with significant organic usage we'd seen only a much smaller number of emojis added and in my opinion to nobody's disadvantage.
But this is easy for me to say. I'm curious how emojis help with your accessibility needs. Has it to do with the fact that they take up little screen space or is it something else?
When somebody sends a bunch of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs mixed in with some mathematical symbols, with a little Katakana on top, I have no idea what they mean. The message may encode some visual meaning due to how the characters look and the visual patterns they form when placed in combination, but its semantic meaning isn't clear, so a non-visual technology cannot interpret and pronounce it properly.
This is a very common issue with "fancy font generators", which were common in certain Twitter communities once upon a time.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K93zcgFsynk&ab_channel=Vsauc...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrHTI04i9yk&ab_channel=%E2%8...
This is done by using invisible characters such as ZWNJ to get around the title filter.
For. Every. Single. Emoji.
I don't remember a case when I really wanted a sexualized version, I always want to express just an emotion. Just remove all the prefixed versions, and leave the pure one.
It’s Not Wrong that “[that formidable facepalm]”.length == 36
<h1 class="wp-block-post-title">It’s Not Wrong tha
t (for HN) “<img draggable="false" role="img"
class="emoji" alt="[that formidable facepalm]" sr
c="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/16.0.1/svg/1f
926-1f3fc-200d-2642-fe0f.svg">”.length == 36</h1>
---
This comment is brought to you thanks: "View Selection Source" context menu entry in Firefox.
Are there any even mildly-popular languages that use, or allow, curly quotes for strings? I’d kinda like there to be at least one.
%{hello, world!}
my $string1 = q{for example};
my $string2 = q<angle brackets>;
my $string3 = q/or any other symbol/;It’s not wrong that "\u{1F926}\u{1F3FC}\u200D\u2642\uFE0F".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981525 - Aug 2025 (274 comments)
(btw the title edit on that one was for fun, and came about this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981808)
Also related:
It’s not wrong that "🤦🏼♂️".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159443 - June 2023 (303 comments)
String length functions for single emoji characters evaluate to greater than 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591373 - March 2021 (127 comments)
String Lengths in Unicode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914184 - Sept 2019 (140 comments)
(as you can see, we've taken quite a few different whacks at that piñata of a title over the years)
merelysounds•5mo ago
It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36
Or some alternative if the above is too long, like:
“[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36
Both seem more accurate than the current:
It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “ ”.length == 36
johnisgood•5mo ago
chuckadams•5mo ago
franky47•5mo ago
Checks out.
chrismorgan•5mo ago
But I was definitely going to hunt for a description that made it 36 characters long.
mattigames•5mo ago