Removing people using UTF-8 👩‍👩‍👦‍👦

While I was writing my new article I found out about really cool thing I am going to share with you.

Check out this emoji containing 4 people 👩‍👩‍👦‍👦.

While I was trying to delete 👩‍👩‍👦‍👦 in VSCode using backspace it
didn't disappear, but it just changed to this 👩‍👩‍👦. After hitting another backspace it changed to 👩‍👩 then to 👩 and then it finally disappeared. So it goes

👩‍👩‍👦‍👦 ⌫ 👩‍👩‍👦 ⌫ 👩‍👩 ⌫ 👩 ⌫

Why this happens?

When we look on the decoded symbols, we can see that the symbols are equal to this in hex:

👩‍👩‍👦‍👦:  0x1f469 0x200d 0x1f469 0x200d 0x1f466 0x200d 0x1f466
👩‍👩‍👦‍👦:  0x1f469 0x200d 0x1f469 0x200d 0x1f466
👩‍👩:    0x1f469 0x200d 0x1f469
👩:   0x1f469

While 0x200d character is a "ZERO WIDTH JOINER" which tells the renderer, that the preceding and following characters should join each other. 🎉

So it is like 👩 + 👩 + 👦 + 👦.

Cool isn't it?

PS:

Removing of single woman works as well, so this 👩‍👦‍👦 can transformed to the hex code like this: 0x1f469 0x200d 0x1f466 0x200d 0x1f466