It's pretty funny that reversing the American flag yields Soviet Union(SU).
Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?
101–110 of 247 posts
Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> By contrast, we all 100% knew what reversing an ASCII string meant, with no ambiguity. Not if the ASCII string employed the backspace control character to accomplish what is today done with Unicode combining characters. Or, in fact, if it employed any other kind of control sequence.
I always thought it was interesting that ASCII is transparently just a bunch of control codes for a typewriter (where "strike an 'a'" is a mechanical instruction no different from "reset the carriage position"), but when we wanted to represent symbolic data we copied it and included all of the nonsensical mechanical instructions.
Well the control codes were specifically for TTY rather than typewriters, many of the control codes still make sense from that standpoint.
Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?
#103If you think the Unicode flag emoji take a lot of bytes, then consider the family emoji! ( https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#family ) I'm in the process of designing a scripting language and implementing it in C++. I plan to put together a YouTube series about it. (Doesn't everyone want to see Bison and Flex mixed with proper unit tests and C++20 code?) Due to my future intended use case, I needed…
It always feels like the most amount of work goes to the least used emoji. So many revisions and additions to the family emoji and yet it’s one of the ones I don’t recall anyone ever using. I think the trap Unicode got in to is technically they can have infinite emoji so they just don’t ever have a way to say no to new proposals.
> It always feels like the most amount of work goes to the least used emoji.
I always feel like those emoji were added on purpose in order to force implementations to fix their unicode support. Before emoji were added, most software had completely broken support for anything beyond the BMP (case study: MySQL's so-called "UTF8" encoding). The introduction of emoji, and their immediate popularity, forced many systems to better support astral planes (that is officially acknowledged: https://unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html#EO1)
Progressively, emoji using more advanced features got introduced, which force systems (and developers) to fix their unicode-handling, or at least improve it somewhat e.g. skintones for combining codepoints, etc....
> I think the trap Unicode got in to is technically they can have infinite emoji so they just don’t ever have a way to say no to new proposals.
You should try to follow a new character through the process, because that's absolutely not what happens and shepherding a new emoji through to standardisation is not an easy task. The unicode consortium absolutely does say no, and has many reasons to do so. There's an entire page on just proposal guidelines (https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html), and following it does not in any way ensure it'll be accepted.
Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean no but only because I don’t understand the characters. Someone who reads Arabic (I assume based on the shape) would have no trouble. You’re nitpicking cases where for some readers visual characters might be hard to distinguish but it doesn’t change the fact that there exists a correct answer for every piece of text that will be obvious to readers of that text which is the definition of a grapheme cluster.
> the fact that there exists a correct answer for every piece of text that will be obvious to readers of that text which is the definition of a grapheme cluster. No, I insist there is not a single "correct answer," even if a reader has perfect knowledge of the language(s) involved. Now remember, this is already moving the goalposts, since it was claimed that a human needed "no knowledge" to get to this allegedly "cor…
You added the requirement that it be a single correct answer. I just asserted that there existed a correct answer. You're being woefully pedantic -- a human who can read the text presented to them but no knowledge of unicode was my intended meaning. Grapheme clusters are language dependent and chosen for readers of languages that use the characters involved. There's no implicit feeling, this is what the standards body has decided is the "right way to do it." If you want to use different grapheme clusters because you think the Unicode people are wrong then fine, use those. You can still reverse the string.
Like what are you even arguing? You declared that something was impossible and then ended with that it's not only possible but it's so possible that there are many reasonable correct answers. Pick one and call it a day.
Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?
#105So what was the deal with the Scottish flag?
From Wikipedia: > A separate mechanism (emoji tag sequences) is used for regional flags, such as England , Scotland , Wales , Texas or California . It uses U+1F3F4 WAVING BLACK FLAG and formatting tag characters instead of regional indicator symbols. It is based on ISO 3166-2 regions with hyphen removed and lowercase, e.g. GB-ENG → gbeng, terminating with U+E00…
This was the only part that was surprising to me, and as it turns out my surprise mostly stems from still not really understanding how the United Kingdom works.
Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?
#106Works in Swift, which is the benefit of Swift having the most painful String API possible:
let v = "Flag: " String(v.reversed()) // Output: :galF v.count // Output: 7
Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> imagine handing a Unicode string to a human. They could without any knowledge look at the characters they see and produce the correct string reversal. I really highly doubt it. How do you reverse this?: مرحبًا ، هذه سلسلة. Can you do it without any knowledge about whether what looks like one character is actually a special case joiner between two adjacent codepoints that only happens in one direction? Can you do it…
You can even demonstrate a similar concept with English and Latin characters. There is no single thing called a "grapheme" linguistically. There are actually two different types of graphemes. The character sequence "sh" in English is a single referential grapheme but two analogical graphemes. Depending on what the specification means, "short" could be reversed as either "trosh" or "trohs". That's without getting into…
The fact that how to reverse a piece of text is locale dependent doesn't mean it's impossible. Basically and transformation on text will be locale dependent. Hell, length is locale dependent.
Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that somewhere in this answer lies a reason why Windows still doesn't support flag emoji. I don't count Microsoft Edge as "Windows" in this case, but as Chromium. Windows doesn't support flag emoji in its native text boxes, but it does support even colorized emoji. But then again, flags seem to be not only Unicode-hard but post-Unicode-hard.
> But then again, flags seem to be not only Unicode-hard but post-Unicode-hard. Flags are not that hard, they're a very specific block combining in very predictable way. They're little more than ligatures. Family emoji are much harder. And this is not "post-Unicode" in any way.
Flags are not that hard, they're a very specific block combining in very predictable way.
But before their introduction, you could decide if there's a grapheme cluster break between codepoints just by looking at the two codepoints in question. Now, you may need to parse a whole sequence of codepoints to see how flags pair up.
Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
It always feels like the most amount of work goes to the least used emoji. So many revisions and additions to the family emoji and yet it’s one of the ones I don’t recall anyone ever using. I think the trap Unicode got in to is technically they can have infinite emoji so they just don’t ever have a way to say no to new proposals.
They do say no though. Frequently too. The problem with Unicode is simply that it’s trying to solve a very hard problem.
Exactly this. Humans have incredibly complicated writing systems, and all Unicode wants to do is encode them all. Keep in mind that the trivial toy system we're more familiar with, ASCII, already has some pretty strange features because even to half-arse one human writing system they needed those features.
Case is totally wild, it only applies to like 5% of the symbols in ASCII, but in the process it means they each need two codepoints and you're expected to carry around tech for switching back and forth between cases.
And then there are several distinct types of white space, each gets a codepoint, some of them try to mess with your text's "position" which may not make any sense in the context where you wanted to use it. What does it mean to have a "horizontal tab" between two parts of the text I wanted to draw on this mug? I found a document which says it is the same as "eight spaces" which seems wrong because surely if you wanted eight spaces you'd just write eight spaces.
And after all that ASCII doesn't have working quotation marks, it doesn't understand how to spell a bunch of common English words like naïve or café, pretty disappointing.
Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?
#110If flag emojis are really a combination of 2 special characters, the reversal of the U.S. flag should result in having the Soviet Union flag.
Just tried reversing a Spanish flag with Python and indeed I got Sweden back