For Instagram to use emojis correctly, an Android device had to recognize an iPhone emoji, and vice versa.įor the solution, Instagram turned to regular expressions, a dense but extremely versatile language for searching for patterns in text. Android also had a set of non-standard emoji encodings. Additionally, some emojis required two strings of numbers.Īpple muddied the waters further by offering users the ability to encode some emojis in various colors, which resulted in non-standard strings. That made them tricky to parse, given that different programming languages used different escape keys, or markers, to signify the end of the numeric string. Emojis used a subset of Unicode, called UTF-16, that allows the numeric strings to be of differing lengths. Unfortunately, creating a single way to search these raw Unicode strings across different platforms was not possible, Mangalick said. With Unicode, each character-be it a letter, symbol or emoji-is represented by a string of hexadecimal numbers, which a programming language or operating system can translate into the appropriate character by using the Unicode guide. Including emojis in Instagram’s hashtag index at first seemed like a simple task. The Unicode standard for encoding the world’s languages on computers adopted a set of 1,282 emojis in 2010, which paved the way for their widespread use on Apple and Android devices. They are often used as shorthand to eliminate the laborious typing of words on small devices. LOL.įirst popularized in Japan during the last decade, emojis convey a wide range of subjects and emotions through the use of simple symbols and pictographs, usually fitted on a 12-by-12-pixel grid. Among Instagram’s 300 million users, emojis are now more widely used than acronyms. Today, almost 60 percent of user text generated on Instagram contains emojis. While elders may bemoan emojis’ putative deleterious effect on language, one thing is for sure: The youth love them. Only by parsing the standard, finding character variations and understanding language differences do they become possible to support,” Instagram engineer Piyush Mangalick wrote in the new post. “Identifying characters can be difficult across programming languages. Turns out that supporting the little digital icons is no easy task. Now, one of the Instagram engineers responsible for this technical feat has shared the company’s approach in a blog item posted Wednesday that should be perused by any developer looking to outfit a social Internet service or consumer app with similar emoji goodness. A user could affix a sprightly emoji to a photo hashtag so the snap could be found by other users searching for that emoji. Last month, the Instagram photo-sharing service started recognizing emojis in its hashtag searches, making the company the first major social networking service to offer this capability. Emojis: Kids may love their simplicity, but programmers will loathe their complexities.
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