Emoji Unicode Inspector
Paste any text to inspect each character — Unicode codepoints, names, categories, emoji version, and byte sizes.
| Char | Codepoint | Name | Bytes |
|---|---|---|---|
| H | U+0048 | Unknown | 1B |
| e | U+0065 | Unknown | 1B |
| l | U+006C | Unknown | 1B |
| l | U+006C | Unknown | 1B |
| o | U+006F | Unknown | 1B |
| U+0020 | Whitespace | 1B | |
| 👋 | U+1F44B | waving hand | 4B |
| U+0020 | Whitespace | 1B | |
| W | U+0057 | Unknown | 1B |
| o | U+006F | Unknown | 1B |
| r | U+0072 | Unknown | 1B |
| l | U+006C | Unknown | 1B |
| d | U+0064 | Unknown | 1B |
| U+0020 | Whitespace | 1B | |
| 🌍 | U+1F30D | globe showing Europe-Africa | 4B |
| ✨ | U+2728 | sparkles | 3B |
How to use the Unicode Inspector
- 📋
Paste your text
Type or paste any text into the input box — emoji, plain text, or a mixture of both. The analysis updates instantly as you type.
- 🔍
Read the table
Each row shows one grapheme (visual character). The table shows the raw character, its Unicode codepoint, name, category, emoji version (if applicable), and UTF-8 byte size.
- 🧮
Check the stats
The summary line shows total character count, how many are emoji, and total byte count — useful for API limits, database column sizes, or SMS encoding checks.
- 🗑️
Clear and repeat
Hit the Clear button to start fresh with new text.
Why inspect emoji Unicode?
Emoji are notoriously tricky for developers. A single visible emoji can be composed of multiple Unicode codepoints joined by zero-width joiners (ZWJ). For example, the family emoji 👨👩👧 is actually five separate codepoints joined together, yet it displays as one character. This makes it essential to understand the difference between string length (codepoints), grapheme count (visible characters), and byte count (storage size) — they can differ by orders of magnitude.
This tool uses the Intl.Segmenter API (with an Array.from() fallback) to correctly split text into grapheme clusters, giving you accurate per-character analysis. It is especially useful when debugging truncation bugs, validating form field lengths, working with SMS character limits, or understanding emoji version compatibility across platforms.
About Emoji Inspector
Emoji Inspector is a developer and typographer's tool that decodes any text you paste into it, revealing the Unicode codepoint, official name, Unicode version, and category for every single character — including emoji, invisible joiners, skin tone modifiers, and variation selectors. It is the quickest way to understand exactly what is inside a complex emoji sequence or a block of pasted text.
How to Use
- 1Paste or type any text into the input field — emoji, mixed text, or anything from your clipboard.
- 2The tool instantly breaks the input down character by character.
- 3Each character is shown with its rendered glyph, Unicode codepoint (e.g. U+1F600), official name, Unicode version, and category.
- 4Click any row to copy that character's codepoint or name to your clipboard.
- 5Use the detail panel to read the full Unicode metadata for any selected character.
- 6Clear the field and paste new text to analyse something different.
Tips & Tricks
- ✓Paste a complex multi-person or family emoji to see how many individual codepoints are joined by Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) sequences — the results are often surprising.
- ✓Use it to debug text rendering issues: invisible characters, directional marks, and variation selectors are exposed and labelled here when they are invisible everywhere else.
- ✓The Unicode version field is useful for checking whether an emoji will render correctly on older operating systems that have not updated their emoji font.
- ✓Copy the codepoint in U+ notation directly from the inspector to reference it in CSS \content properties or HTML entities.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Unicode codepoint?
A codepoint is the unique number assigned to every character in the Unicode standard. It is written in the format U+XXXX, where XXXX is a hexadecimal number — for example, U+1F600 represents the 😀 grinning face emoji.
Why does one emoji sometimes show as multiple characters?
Many emoji are composite sequences — a base emoji combined with a skin tone modifier, gender sign, and Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) characters. Emoji Inspector shows every individual codepoint in the sequence.
Can I inspect emoji from other languages and scripts?
Yes. The tool handles any Unicode text, so you can paste Arabic, Chinese, Devanagari, or any other script and see the codepoints and names for those characters too.