Support characters followed by a variation selector

[PhilC813]

Unicode variation selectors are non-printing characters that are designed to specify the way that a preceding character is displayed.

The most useful ones are the emoji-related ones:
FE0E: text variant
FE0F: emoji variant

So take a character like the Up Arrow Emoji; it has both a text and an emoji variant. If you don't add a subsequent variation selector, the default variant seems up to the software you're using. For example, on my Android 14 device, it defaults to the text variant. So the only way to have this character appear as emoji is to add the FE0F variation selector afterwards.

While symbl.cc does have all variation selectors in its database, the website visibly hasn't been designed with those in mind.

Again, going back to Up Arrow Emoji as an example, here's how the website behaves on my device:

• If you enter the character from Google's Gboard keyboard in the website's search field, it doesn't recognize the emoji at all. That's because it is effectively two separate Unicode characters; the core character, and the variation selector FE0F.
• The same issue arises the other way. If you use the website's "copy" button on the character's page, which is shown as the emoji, it is actually the text variant that is copied to the clipboard, because it's missing the subsequent FE0F variation selector.

symbl.cc is definitely not the only Unicode database website with this limitation, but some websites did solve it. For example, take this one; you can see that the instance of the character contains both the core character and the variation selector. This database implementation solves both issues seen with symbl.cc.