What is a code point?

A code point is simply the number Unicode gives a character. The fire emoji 🔥 is code point U+1F525. Understanding code points clears up a lot of confusion about text and emoji.

The U+ notation

Code points are written as U+ followed by hexadecimal digits: U+0041 (A), U+00E9 (é), U+1F600 (😀). The range runs from U+0000 to U+10FFFF.

Code point ≠ byte

A code point is an abstract number. How many bytes it takes to store depends on the encoding: in UTF-8, “A” is 1 byte but 😀 is 4 bytes. Don't confuse the character's identity (its code point) with its storage (its bytes).

Code point ≠ what users see

What a person perceives as one character (a “grapheme”) can be several code points — an emoji with a skin tone, or a flag, is multiple code points combined. So “length” in code points isn't the same as visible characters.

'🔥'.codePointAt(0).toString(16)  // '1f525'
'👨\u200d💻'.length              // 5 (multiple code units!)

Frequently asked questions