There have been a variety of Unicode encoding methods over the years, but modern programs dealing with strings will probably be using UTF-8 encoding — and you should too.

Unicode is launching a fund-raising campaign called "Adopt-a-Character," which allows you to adopt any emoji, letter, number, or symbol on the keyboard. Different characters cost different amounts.

He worked with Emojination, which advocates for more inclusive emoji, to submit the proposal to Unicode, the universal standard bearer for emoji, in March 2018.