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.

Unicode 7.0 introduces 2,834 new characters, including 250 emoji New release doesn't do much for diversity, but at least you can flip the bird.

By letting users code for directionality (definitely to the right, maybe even going up or down), Unicode can adopt Emoji 15.1 to cultures that read both left-to-right and right-to-left.