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JavaScript Brain Teasers: Exercise Your Mind

Discussion: How Long Is a Pirate Flag?

Understand how JavaScript counts the length of emojis, focusing on the pirate flag emoji composed of multiple code units and the zero-width joiner. Learn to use the Intl.Segmenter API to correctly measure emoji lengths and handle Unicode characters precisely in your code.

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Verifying the output

Now, it’s time to execute the code and observe the output.

Javascript (babel-node-es2024)
// Happy Flag Day!
const flag = "🏴‍☠";
console.log(flag.length);

Understanding the output

You might have anticipated that the output would be 1, but this code will actually output:

4

Emoji zero-width joiner (ZWJ)

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