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Welcome to my talk called 'Family Emojis'. It’s my first talk at this conference, and it’s also my first time attending. I really appreciate that you voted for this talk and came here to listen. Thank you very much for that.
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A little bit about me: my name is Sven, and I’m a Ruby back-end developer working at Sing is Inc since 2018. Unlike many developers who share their Twitter handles, I am not on Twitter or Facebook. If you’d like to get in touch with me or provide feedback, you can message me on the Ruby message network where my handle is ‘sweetie’. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I recommend it.
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Now, let’s dive into what this talk is all about. It focuses on a challenge my team faced and what we learned from it. The key issue we encountered involves counting characters in a string that includes the family emoji.
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The challenge is to count characters consistently across all platforms: Android, iOS, web, and our Ruby back-end. We realized that counting correctly is subjective; for example, one could argue about the length of a family emoji being 7. The main aspect we focused on was consistency in our character counts.
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To illustrate, let’s consider various types of characters: extended Latin characters, emojis, pictographs, and Chinese characters. Each of these character types presents unique complexities in counting, especially emojis and Zalgo text.
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For instance, you might view an accented 'e' as one character with an accent or as two characters: the accent and the 'e'. This brings us to the concept of normal forms, which help standardize character representation. Two normal forms are the Composed Normal Form (NFC) and Decomposed Normal Form (NFD), which respectively decide how many characters we count.
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We researched these normal forms and discovered that, in Ruby, you can normalize strings using a function to standardize the character count. Most platforms default to NFC when counting characters, and we decided to adopt this norm.
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Next, let’s discuss how different encodings work in Ruby. The most commonly used one is UTF-8, but there are other encodings as well. UTF-16 is the default in JavaScript and Cocoa frameworks, while UTF-8 is standard for Ruby and most web content.
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We also explored how character counting varies with encoding formats, focusing on the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16. For instance, while Ruby’s operations on UTF-16 can be unusual, JavaScript seamlessly counts characters using the length property.
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When we analyzed how an emoji is represented in UTF-8 and UTF-16, we found that in UTF-8, an emoji corresponds to four bytes, while in UTF-16, it could be represented with six bytes. This led us to consider the byte order mark (BOM) and how byte order influences character representation.
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The byte order mark tells how the bytes should be interpreted. Understanding big-endian versus little-endian formats is crucial for character representation across different systems.
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Ultimately, we realized that the discrepancies arising from counting in UTF-16—particularly with emojis—led to a situation where what we expected did not match the encoded values.
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Through our investigation, we confirmed that the character counts in UTF-16 include the BOM, which can result in unexpected totals when counting characters. For example, counting an emoji could yield two characters where we expected one.
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During my exploration of emoji length, I often wondered if different platforms counted certain emojis consistently. This concern culminated in discussions around the use of NFC in counting and how differing methodologies lead to varied character lengths.
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We found that certain emojis combined to form new characters still required careful consideration on how to count them. Each time we tried to expand on a character, we needed to accurately assess whether it would generate a new count.
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As we made adjustments and changes in our approaches to counting Unicode characters, it was essential to note how different programming languages may vary in how they handle these situations. This fact posed challenges, especially when scaling across platforms.
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Looking ahead, we understand the importance of maintaining consistency in character counts and sharing this information across systems, so each player can interact harmoniously with each other.
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Thank you for your attention so far, and now I would like to open the floor for any questions.
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One question that arose involved how to validate a maximum character length across platforms without losing consistency in the count. For instance, when evaluating counts in iOS versus JavaScript, you may find discrepancies.
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The follow-up discussion focused on how databases count characters and how they might enforce constraints that could clash with frontend expectations. This led to a realization that adjusting validation rather than character limits might be the preferable route.
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We also looked at some character tests across platforms to validate how characters, especially complex ones like emojis, are counted, and we discovered varying results. This variability adds to the challenge of establishing norms across character counting.
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In conclusion, what we found during our research was that most programming languages might not agree on specific emojis when it comes to character counts. This revelation underscores the necessity for teams working with cross-platform applications to devise strategies to maintain consistency in their character counting logic.
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Thank you for being such an attentive audience during this presentation. Are there any other questions?
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(Applauding) Thank you. If you have thoughts about the material shared or ideas on how we might refine our approach to character counting moving forward, please feel free to reach out.”},{
