Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?

davidamos.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 247 posts

Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?

#131

Post by emodendroket »

AlanYx wrote: post #127
emodendroket wrote: post #114

What I'd like to know is, given the explosion of the character set for emoji, does the rationale for Han unification still make sense? The case for not allowing national variants seems less and less compelling with every emoji they add. This is a bit of a hobby horse, but imagine if every time you read an article in English on your phone some of the letters were replaced with "equivalent" Greek or Cyrillic one and yo…

I agree that Han unification was an unfortunate design decision, but I'd argue that the consortium is following a consistent approach to the Han unification with emoji. For example, they treat "regional" vendor variations in emoji as a font issue. If you get a message with the gun emoji, unless you have out-of-band information regarding which vendor variant is intended, there's no way in software to know if it should…

I don't disagree, but my point is more than their concern was about having "too many characters" in Unicode, which no longer seems to be a real concern, so what would be the harm of adding national variants?

Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?

#132

Post by da12 »

qqii wrote: post #39

> Challenge: How would you go about writing a function that reverses a string while leaving symbols encoded as sequences of code points intact? Can you do it from scratch? Is there a package available in your language that can do it for you? How did that package solve the problem? So are there any good libraries that can deal with code points that are merged together into a single pictographic and reverse them "as ex…

If you're using Python, check out grapheme: https://github.com/alvinlindstam/grapheme

Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?

#133

Post by saltminer »

dhosek wrote: post #20

On the challenge front, there are things like á which might be a single code point or two code points (a+´). Then there are the really challenging things like ᾷ where if the components are individual characters, the order of ͺ and ῀ are not guaranteed to be consistent.

Then you have stuff like zalgo text (http://eeemo.net/) which takes pride in abusing code points

Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?

#134

Post by faebi »

Why reverse them if one barely can implement, display and edit them correctly. I never could make them work perfectly in VIM. Also I had to open a bug in Firefox recently:

Flag emojis and others are displayed in double the size on Windows 10 using Firefox Nightly https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1746795

Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?

#135

Post by mike_hock »

masklinn wrote: post #103
Gigachad wrote: post #73

Earlier 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.

> 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 t…

WTF business do emojis have in Unicode? The BMP is all there ever should have been. Standardize the actual writing systems of the world, so everyone can write in their language. And once that is done, the standard doesn't need to change for a hundred years.

What we need now is a standardized, sane subset of Unicode that implementations can support while rejecting the insane scope creep that got added on top of that. I guess the BMP is a good start, even though it already contains superfluous crap like "dingbats" and boxes.

Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?

#136

Post by samatman »

wahern wrote: post #50
treesknees wrote: post #42

But you can, and did, reverse a string. It seems you would need more details, such as a request to reverse the meaning or interpretation of the string, which is what the author is getting at. If someone challenges you to reverse an image, what do you do? Do you invert the colors? Mirror horizontally? Mirror vertically? Just reverse the byte order?

There's a specification problem here. I like to say that a "string" isn't a data structure, it's the absence of one. Discussing "strings" is pointless. It follows that comparing programming languages by their "string" handling is likewise pointless. Case in point: a "struct" in languages like C and Rust is literally a specification of how to treat segments of a "string" of contiguous bytes.

We would all be better off if this were actually true.

Tragically, in C, a string is just barely a data structure, because it must have \0 at the end.

If it were the complete absence of a data structure, we would need some way to get at the length of it, and could treat a slice of it as the same sort of thing as the thing itself.

Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?

#138

Post by Someone »

jerf wrote: post #6

So, in terms of acing interviews, increasingly one of the best answers to the question "Write some code that reverses a string" is that in a world of unicode, "reversing a string" is no longer possible or meaningful. You'll probably be told "oh, assume US ASCII" or something, but in the meantime, if you can back that up when they dig into it, you'll look really smart.

Even ASCII can be argued to be problematic.

What is “3 >= 2", reversed?

What is “Rijksmuseum”, reversed? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph); capitalization isn’t simple here, either (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)#Capitalisation)

What is “Schroeder”, reversed? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#Printing...)

Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?

#139

Post by kingcharles »

mike_hock wrote: post #135
masklinn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

WTF business do emojis have in Unicode? The BMP is all there ever should have been. Standardize the actual writing systems of the world, so everyone can write in their language. And once that is done, the standard doesn't need to change for a hundred years. What we need now is a standardized, sane subset of Unicode that implementations can support while rejecting the insane scope creep that got added on top of that.…

Have emoji not become part of our writing structure though? A decent percentage of online chats and comments, especially on social networks, includes at least one emoji that couldn't be easily or accurately represented in the regular written language.

Re: Why can't you reverse a string with a flag emoji?

#140

Post by Waterluvian »

I wish languages did a far better job clearly distinguishing between their operations:

1. You are acting in byte space and it’s pretty unambiguous what should happen. We are not acknowledging the semantics of language and alphabets.

2. You’re acting in language space and these operations will behave the way you probably think they should (depending on your cultural expectations, probably)

Post reply on HN