There have been a variety of Unicode encoding methods over the years, but modern programs dealing with strings will probably be using UTF-8 encoding — and you should too.

When you’re restricted to ASCII, how can you represent more complex things like emojis or non-Latin characters? One answer is Punycode, which is a way to represent Unicode characters in ASCII… ...

But along with its release of the new emoji this week, Unicode explained that it also considers user data as a key factor in the emoji selection process, including how people are using existing emoji.