#LearnedToday: Compound Emoji 👨‍💻

Today is Emoji day, and I'd like to share something I learned about emojis that blew my mind! 🤯

Did you know that the 👨‍💻 "Man Technologist" emoji (aka developer) is created by combining other two emojis? 👨 "Man" & 💻 "Laptop"

These types of emojis are called Compound emoji, and they exist thanks to a non-printable character called the "Zero Width Joiner" (\u200D), which is used to merge two or more emojis.

So the final equation is: 👨 + ZWJ + 💻 = 👨‍💻

You can see it clearly if you use the spread operator on the emoji string!

const compoundEmoji = '👨‍💻';
const explodedEmoji = [...compoundEmoji];

console.log(explodedEmoji);

// ['👨', '‍', '💻']
// The second element is the unicode character ZWJ

I've created a stackblitz demo where you can play with emojis in JavaScript

Check out also these useful links:

• https://eclecticlight.co/2018/03/15/compound-emoji-can-confuse
• https://emojipedia.org/emoji-zwj-sequence
• [BONUS: talking emoji] https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-i-made-a-talking-emoji-using-regular-emojis-and-javascript-fe20e62ba10