Instagram engineer delves into emoji madness

The story has been fixed on the wire. The fourth paragraph now reads:

"Identifying characters can be difficult across programming languages. Only by parsing the standard, finding character variations and understanding language differences do they become possible to support," Instagram engineer Thomas Dimson wrote in the new post.

The first sentence of the eighth paragraph now reads:

Unfortunately, creating a single way to search these raw Unicode strings across different platforms was not possible, Dimson wrote.