In programs in which Alt codes over 255 do not work, the character retrieved usually corresponds to the remainder when the number is divided by 256. It is often practical to just find the desired character on the web or in another document, and copy and paste it from there. Flag emoji have been with us for nearly as long as we’ve had emoji on our cell phones. Originally, there were only 10 flags to choose from, a far cry from the bounty of flags available to us today — everything from Andorra to Zimbabwe. But all good things must come to an and, and it appears that the all-you-can-wave flag buffet will soon be closed. Red Heart was approved as part of Unicode 1.1 in 1993 under the name “Heavy Black Heart” and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.
Almost all email sent today uses the MIME standard for the actual email content. MIME allows us to send attachments, HTML email and very often an additional plain text version of the email intended for basic, less capable email clients. In each of these MIME parts, the email client needs to add headers for Content-Transfer-Encoding’ andContent-Type` and be sure to add the proper character set. Wikipedia lists more than 50 different email clients in a feature comparison chart. Would you bet that all of these clients handle international characters the exact same way?
The maximum Unicode code point is U+10FFFF, and Unicode only defines operations on code points up through that. But Perl works on code points up to the maximum permissible signed number available on the platform. However, Perl will not accept these from input streams unless lax rules are being used, and will warn (using the warning category “non_unicode”, which is a sub-category of “utf8”) if any are output. The original UTF-8 specification allowed up to 6 bytes, to allow encoding of numbers up to 0x7FFF_FFFF.
