TIL: Many emojis are actually multiple emojis combined together, not single characters

Ever wondered why some emojis take up more character count than expected? (Especially when dealing with input character count) Turns out many emojis are actually combinations of simpler ones!

Examples of composite emojis:

👨‍👨‍👦‍👦 = 👨+👨+👦+👦 (family of four men)
👩‍💻 = 👩+💻 (woman technologist)
🏳️‍🌈 = 🏳️+🌈 (rainbow flag)
👨‍🍳 = 👨+🍳 (man cook)
🧑🏻‍🎨 = 🧑 + 🏻 + 🎨 (artist: light skin tone)

Developer gotcha: Different programming languages handle Unicode differently, so emoji length calculations can vary between frontend and backend. Always test your character limits with composite emojis.

JavaScript examples:

For javascript, Intl.Segmenter can be a great help

const family = '👨‍👨‍👦‍👦';

// Default length - counts UTF-16 code units
console.log(family.length); // 11

// Destructuring - counts grapheme clusters  
console.log([...family].length); // 7

// See the actual components
console.log(Array.from(family)); 
// ['👨', '‍', '👨', '‍', '👦', '‍', '👦']

// For accurate user-visible character count
const segmenter = new Intl.Segmenter('en', {granularity: 'grapheme'});
console.log([...segmenter.segment(family)].length); // 1