I can set a variable to be an emoji, but using the letter X of Y block on an emoji returns an error symbol instead of the emoji. A demo is available @ https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1030802587/

Inside where?
I've used emojis and special characters in list/variable names and their data, they all work fine.

awesome-llama wrote:

(#2)
Inside where?
I've used emojis and special characters in list/variable names and their data, they all work fine.

Sorry, upon closer investigation, it seems that the letter X of Y block doesn't work at all with emojis. See https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1030802587/

Basically: JavaScript (the programming language Scratch uses) stores text using UTF-16 encoding, which means characters take up 2 bytes each. These pairs of 2 bytes are called “code units”.
This can represent characters up to Unicode code point U+FFFF, which is everything in the Basic Multilingual Plane (or BMP for short). Anything above that is represented using multiple code units, and as such count as multiple characters to JavaScript (as properly counting characters would require iterating the text to look for split codepoints, which is more performance-intensive). Therefore, they also count as multiple letters to Scratch's “letter of” block.. Emojis are outside the BMP, so they get split. If you e.g take letters 1 and 2 of an emoji, and join them together, you get the full emoji again.

CST1229 wrote:

(#4)
Basically: JavaScript (the programming language Scratch uses) stores text using UTF-16 encoding, which means characters take up 2 bytes each. These pairs of 2 bytes are called “code units”.
This can represent characters up to Unicode code point U+FFFF, which is everything in the Basic Multilingual Plane (or BMP for short). Anything above that is represented using multiple code units, and as such count as multiple characters to JavaScript (as properly counting characters would require iterating the text to look for split codepoints, which is more performance-intensive). Therefore, they also count as multiple letters to Scratch's “letter of” block.. Emojis are outside the BMP, so they get split. If you e.g take letters 1 and 2 of an emoji, and join them together, you get the full emoji again.

Thank you