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[โ€“] 2 points 6 months ago (6 children)

How do emoji use more data? They're one, maybe two unicode characters?

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)
  • [โ€“] 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Than an entire word?

    Take "cactus" for example. Each letter in the word "cactus" is one unicode character, for a total of six. ๐ŸŒต is one unicode character, U+1F335.

    Unicode characters are 4 bytes long, so "cactus" takes 24 bytes to transmit, where "๐ŸŒต" takes 4. Unless something something UTF_8?

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 6 months ago* (1 child)

    You're close, Unicode characters don't imply a number of bytes, it's how they're encoded that does (utf-8 most commonly). Utf-8 can be as little as one byte or as many as four, depending on the specific character. I don't know about emojis but I imagine they're in the four bytes section. Whereas "asdf" is also four bytes in utf-8.

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  • So I just looked it up, the UTF-8 encoding for the cactus emoji is 4 bytes long: 0xF0 0x9F 0x8C 0xB5

    Where the Latin alphabet is in the 1-byte region.

    So it takes 6 bytes to transmit "cactus" in UTF-8, and only 4 to transmit โ€œ๐ŸŒตโ€. So any emoji that replaces 5 or more letters is more efficient. ๐Ÿ† breaks even with "dick" or "cock", more efficient than "penis", more than twice as compact as "eggplant" or "aubergine".

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