Variation Selector-16
Symbol Meaning
An invisible codepoint which specifies that the preceding character should be displayed with emoji presentation. Only required if the preceding character defaults to text presentation.
Often used in Emoji ZWJ Sequences, where one or more characters in the sequence have text and emoji presentation, but otherwise default to text (black and white) display.
Examples
Snowman as text: ☃. Snowman as Emoji: ☃️
Black Heart as text: ❤. Black Heart as Emoji: ❤️ (not so black)
The symbol “Variation Selector-16” is included in the “Emoji-specific variation selectors” subblock of the “Variation Selectors” block and was approved as part of Unicode version 3.2 in 2002.
| Unicode Name | Variation Selector-16 |
| Unicode Number | |
| HTML Code | |
| CSS Code | |
| Plane | 0: Basic Multilingual Plane |
| Unicode Block | Variation Selectors |
| Unicode Subblock | Emoji-specific variation selectors |
| Unicode Version | 3.2 (2002) |
| Type of paired mirror bracket (bidi) | None |
| Composition Exclusion | No |
| Case change | FE0F |
| Simple case change | FE0F |
| Case_Ignorable | + |
| ID_Continue | + |
| XID_Continue | + |
| Default_Ignorable_Code_Point | + |
| Grapheme_Extend | + |
| scripts | Inherited |
| Variation_Selector | + |
| InCB | + |
| Encoding | hex | dec (bytes) | dec | binary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UTF-8 | EF B8 8F | 239 184 143 | 15710351 | 11101111 10111000 10001111 |
| UTF-16BE | FE 0F | 254 15 | 65039 | 11111110 00001111 |
| UTF-16LE | 0F FE | 15 254 | 4094 | 00001111 11111110 |
| UTF-32BE | 00 00 FE 0F | 0 0 254 15 | 65039 | 00000000 00000000 11111110 00001111 |
| UTF-32LE | 0F FE 00 00 | 15 254 0 0 | 268304384 | 00001111 11111110 00000000 00000000 |