It’s not wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36 (zaerl.com)

Perhaps the title should be changed to:

It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36

Or some alternative if the above is too long, like:

“[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36

Both seem more accurate than the current:

It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “ ”.length == 36

> " ".length == 36

Heh. In my code, I always (idiosyncratically, I admit) spell '\x20' as '\x20' (or even just as 0x20, if it's C), unless it's a part of a multicharacter string e.g. "Hello world!": it just feels wrong to have an empty space inside single quotes. Is it really just U+0020 in there? Is it supposed to be U+0020 there? Silly worries, I know, but I just don't like the way ' ' looks.

I don’t want emojis in the headlines please. It makes it difficult to read and becomes an arms race for attention.

Also I’m not even sure it was a good idea to put them in text. Emojis are a special case that breaks a lot. Now you have to worry about multiple colors, etc.

Example YouTube videos that have "no title":

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K93zcgFsynk&ab_channel=Vsauc...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrHTI04i9yk&ab_channel=%E2%8...

This is done by using invisible characters such as ZWNJ to get around the title filter.

Only if you're counting bytes

Grumpy old guy: Can we just stop with new unicode characters? We don't need to be able to capture every human thought or concept in a character. Feels like the Unicode Consortium is chaired by Funes the Memorious.

Thanks for fixing the title of this post! [U+1F642 slightly smiling face emoji] (I wrote the post)

I see delightful unintended layer of irony in a fact that what the page really uses for the Emoji display are in fact image elements: JavaScript on that page replaces Unicode text with them. So the main heading content

    It’s Not Wrong that “[that formidable facepalm]”.length == 36

(sic syntactically wrong quotes) is in reality (for JS-capable and enabled clients) presented as

    <h1 class="wp-block-post-title">It’s Not Wrong tha
    t (for HN)&nbsp;“<img draggable="false" role="img"
     class="emoji" alt="[that formidable facepalm]" sr
    c="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/16.0.1/svg/1f
    926-1f3fc-200d-2642-fe0f.svg">”.length == 36</h1>

(arbitrary line breaks added for convenience). Here the "true" `.length` of the (scare)quoted content is: 144.

---

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Great introduction, where's the rest of the article?

> “[facepalm emoji]”.length

Are there any even mildly-popular languages that use, or allow, curly quotes for strings? I’d kinda like there to be at least one.

Recent and related:

It’s not wrong that "\u{1F926}\u{1F3FC}\u200D\u2642\uFE0F".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981525 - Aug 2025 (274 comments)

(btw the title edit on that one was for fun, and came about this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981808)

Also related:

It’s not wrong that "🤦🏼‍♂️".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159443 - June 2023 (303 comments)

String length functions for single emoji characters evaluate to greater than 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591373 - March 2021 (127 comments)

String Lengths in Unicode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914184 - Sept 2019 (140 comments)

(as you can see, we've taken quite a few different whacks at that piñata of a title over the years)