# Emoji: how do you get from U+1F355 to 🍕?

DevFeed: [Emoji: how do you get from U+1F355 to 🍕?](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/emoji-how-do-you-get-from-u-1f355-to-35517.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://meowni.ca/posts/emoji-emoji-emoji/>)

Author: Monica Dinculescu

Published: 2016-04-04T00:00:00Z

Content type: tutorial

Language: en

Sources: [Monica Dinculescu](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/monica-dinculescu.md>)

Topics: [Emoji](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/emoji.md>), [JavaScript](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/javascript.md>), [browsers](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/browsers.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>)

Tags: [browsers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/browsers.md>), [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [emojis](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/emojis.md>), [javascript](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/javascript.md>)

## AI overview

This article explains emoji code points and how JavaScript represents them as UTF-16 code units. It also discusses emoji history, Unicode standardization, design guidelines, and surrogate pairs for emoji outside the basic Unicode plane.

## Source excerpt

You know that scene in The Rock where Nicolas Cage is super dreamy (like he is) and decides his life mission is to look for VX poison gas and save San Francisco (like he would)? That's baaaasically me, if by "look for VX poison gas" you mean "nerd out on emoji", and by "save San Francisco" you mean "and tell everyone about it". I mean, you clicked on this link, what did you think was going to happen? 🍿 How did we get so lucky? An emoji is a coloured glyph. They appeared around 1999 in Japan, where each mobile carrier implemented their own variants, and people were sending them around in text messages. This was a bit of a mess, as you can imagine proprietary formats interacting with other proprietary formats to be, so in 2000 there was a proposal to standardize them. It wasn't until 2009, though, that emoji got specced in Unicode 5.2 #blessed. Spec trivia: each emoji has a design guideline and name, which is a description/suggestion of what the emoji should look like. This is why 💁,for example, often gets in trouble for being labelled as Information Desk Person, but is actually just a sassy lady: it's the implementation of the emoji that doesn't match its original description, not the other way around. If you take sassy lady away from me though, there will be words. My favourite description is Clockwise Rightwards and Leftwards Open Circle Arrows With Circled One Overlay (or 🔂 for short), which shows true dedication to typing. Emoji does not have a plural in Japanese, so stop trying to make emojis happen. 🙀 What is an emoji even Every emoji is represented by a code point (a hexadecimal number, zero-padded up to at least four digits, like U+26C4). Because all JavaScript strings are internally (i.e. in browsers) represented in UTF-16, this means that each code point, in turn, can be represented by one or more 16-bit code unit. Some emoji are boring (or in the basic unicode plane), which means one glyph is represented by one code unit. ☃ for example is U+2603 (you'd wri