Except if it's a compound emoji, which takes multiple codepoints -> more than 4 bytes. So really the takeaway is that "character" is highly ambiguous nowadays and shouldn't be used anymore, use one of these instead: * UTF-n code unit * Unicode code point * Grapheme Cluster * Extended Grapheme Cluster For the latter one also needs to specify the version of Unicode they're talking about, since every new compound emojis changes the definition of "Extended Grapheme Cluster".