this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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[โ€“] onlyhalfminotaur@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

You're close, Unicode characters don't imply a number of bytes, it's how they're encoded that does (utf-8 most commonly). Utf-8 can be as little as one byte or as many as four, depending on the specific character. I don't know about emojis but I imagine they're in the four bytes section. Whereas "asdf" is also four bytes in utf-8.

So I just looked it up, the UTF-8 encoding for the cactus emoji is 4 bytes long: 0xF0 0x9F 0x8C 0xB5

Where the Latin alphabet is in the 1-byte region.

So it takes 6 bytes to transmit "cactus" in UTF-8, and only 4 to transmit โ€œ๐ŸŒตโ€. So any emoji that replaces 5 or more letters is more efficient. ๐Ÿ† breaks even with "dick" or "cock", more efficient than "penis", more than twice as compact as "eggplant" or "aubergine".