Poetry with complex emoji

Let's take one of my favourite emoji, the "male programmer": 👨‍💻. If you'd describe this, you could say something like: "It's a man behind a laptop". So what does JavaScript do?

When an emoji is a 'complex' emoji, it's being joined by a zero width joiner character (`u200D`), so you can basically split the emoji String like so:

'👨‍💻'.split('\u200D') // output: ["👨", "💻"]

Or, when you're into magic, just use the spread operator:

[...'👨‍💻'] // output: ["👨", "💻"]

Pretty neat huh?

Well, it gets better, because the opposite is also possible, by joining multiple "simple" emoji into a "complex" emoji. Again, we use the zero width joiner:

["👨", "💻"].join('\u200D') // output: 👨‍💻

It's pretty useless knowledge, but interesting stuff! For the full list of "complex" emoji, please take a look at this unicode chart.

As you can see, these are just all little stories which I think is super neat!

A couple of examples:

'❤️‍🔥'.split('\u200D') // output: ["❤","🔥"]

'🫱🏼‍🫲🏽'.split('\u200D') // output: ["🫱", "🏼", "🫲", "🏽"]

'🧑🏽‍🏫'.split('\u200D') // output: ["🧑", "🏽", "‍", "🏫"]

'👨‍👩‍👧‍👦'.split('\u200D') // output: ["🧑", "👨", "‍", "👩", "‍", "👧", "‍", "👦"]