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Daniel Zotti
Daniel Zotti

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

Check out also these useful links:

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