Emoji Encoding Guide: Unicode Code Points, UTF-8 Bytes, and MySQL utf8mb4
Emojis are Unicode characters above U+FFFF that require UTF-8's 4-byte encoding and MySQL's utf8mb4 charset. Learn how to store, transmit, and display emoji correctly.
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Tags: encoding, unicode, emoji
Emoji Encoding Guide: Unicode Code Points, UTF-8 Bytes, and MySQL utf8mb4 Emoji are Unicode characters. They follow the same encoding rules as any other character — but they live in a range of the Unicode standard that breaks older software, MySQL databases, and naive string operations in almost every language. This guide explains exactly what's happening at the byte level, and what you need to fix when emoji break your stack. UTF-8 Encoding of Emoji The UTF-8 encoding rule for code points in the U+10000–U+10FFFF range (supplementary characters): Let's encode 😀 (U+1F600 = decimal 128512): --- The MySQL utf8 Trap This is the most consequential encoding bug in web development. MySQL's charset is NOT full UTF-8. MySQL introduced a charset in version 4.1 with a maximum of 3 bytes per…
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