WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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Let's say your team has just won a World Cup match.

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Unlikely if you're English, I know.

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But let's say you're French, and you've just stormed it against the Swiss

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and you're feeling patriotic.

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You open up your phone, you go to your Twitter client.

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It gives you 140 characters,

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and the first thing you do is sweep through the keyboard.

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Sweep through the emoji on your phone, until you find the French flag.

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And then you hit the button, and it promptly gives you a nice little wavy flag here.

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The other advantage of the French flag of course,

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very easy to draw compared to the British one.

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There we go.

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But as soon as you do that, just one flag has gone in and your

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character count

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goes down to 138, right away.

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Why does that happen? You've only put one flag in there.

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And there are much more complicated characters you can put in --

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emojis in general, are really long in terms of binary representation.

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But they only count as one character.

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Typing in "a" -- one character. Typing in a really complicated "emoji-smiley-face-thing" -- one character.

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So why is the flag two?

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Well, the reason for that is down to the Unicode Consortium.

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They're the people who decide what goes into Unicode, they're the reason

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you have 250 new emojis just gone in.

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But they didn't want to put flags in Unicode, because flags change really often.

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In the last decade, there have been new countries added.

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There have been countries that have changed from military coup, or

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civilian uprising and have changed their flag.

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And Unicode does not want to have to deal with that.

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So instead, they created something called

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regional indicator symbols.

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Oh yeah, I can totally write on a whiteboard.

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There we go, regional indicator symbols.

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And what they are,

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are characters that are simply A through Z

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with dots around. That's the official representation.

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And what that button is doing, what that French flag button is doing

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is it is not typing in a French flag.

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It's typing in, in reality, behind the scenes, anything that doesn't have a French flag will see...

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an F

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and an R

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FR

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It's the code for France. You get .fr domain names.

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That code is what anything that doesn't support that French flag sees.

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The IPhone does support it.

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Android in most cases does support it.

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Modern versions of Windows, I think, still support it.

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It takes those two characters and goes:

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"Ah, you mean the French flag."

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Puts them together, lies to you, shows you just one character.

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But the character count doesn't lie.

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'cause Twitter sees those as two characters

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because well they are, counts them as two

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Your rate goes down.

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So, there you go.

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Two, characters combined one making the French flag.

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Simple as that.

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That is why it takes two characters to do an emoji flag and not one.

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And if that was vaguely interesting then I've got a much longer video about what counts a character

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in my Language Files series.

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And soon there'll be an upload from Computerphile about emojis and their history

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just here.

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In the mean time, that's why it's two characters for a flag

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and that is something you might not have known.

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This really isn't coming off.

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Is this not whiteboard paint?

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This is just a wall. I have just drawn on the wall.

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