Let's say your team has just won a World Cup match.
Unlikely if you're English, I know.
But let's say you're French, and you've just stormed it against the Swiss
and you're feeling patriotic.
You open up your phone, you go to your Twitter client.
It gives you 140 characters,
and the first thing you do is sweep through the keyboard.
Sweep through the emoji on your phone, until you find the French flag.
And then you hit the button, and it promptly gives you a nice little wavy flag here.
The other advantage of the French flag of course,
very easy to draw compared to the British one.
There we go.
But as soon as you do that, just one flag has gone in and your
character count
goes down to 138, right away.
Why does that happen? You've only put one flag in there.
And there are much more complicated characters you can put in --
emojis in general, are really long in terms of binary representation.
But they only count as one character.
Typing in "a" -- one character. Typing in a really complicated "emoji-smiley-face-thing" -- one character.
So why is the flag two?
Well, the reason for that is down to the Unicode Consortium.
They're the people who decide what goes into Unicode, they're the reason
you have 250 new emojis just gone in.
But they didn't want to put flags in Unicode, because flags change really often.
In the last decade, there have been new countries added.
There have been countries that have changed from military coup, or
civilian uprising and have changed their flag.
And Unicode does not want to have to deal with that.
So instead, they created something called
regional indicator symbols.
Oh yeah, I can totally write on a whiteboard.
There we go, regional indicator symbols.
And what they are,
are characters that are simply A through Z
with dots around. That's the official representation.
And what that button is doing, what that French flag button is doing
is it is not typing in a French flag.
It's typing in, in reality, behind the scenes, anything that doesn't have a French flag will see...
an F
and an R
FR
It's the code for France. You get .fr domain names.
That code is what anything that doesn't support that French flag sees.
The IPhone does support it.
Android in most cases does support it.
Modern versions of Windows, I think, still support it.
It takes those two characters and goes:
"Ah, you mean the French flag."
Puts them together, lies to you, shows you just one character.
But the character count doesn't lie.
'cause Twitter sees those as two characters
because well they are, counts them as two
Your rate goes down.
So, there you go.
Two, characters combined one making the French flag.
Simple as that.
That is why it takes two characters to do an emoji flag and not one.
And if that was vaguely interesting then I've got a much longer video about what counts a character
in my Language Files series.
And soon there'll be an upload from Computerphile about emojis and their history
just here.
In the mean time, that's why it's two characters for a flag
and that is something you might not have known.
This really isn't coming off.
Is this not whiteboard paint?
This is just a wall. I have just drawn on the wall.
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