The problem is that the final glyphs are hard-coded. Although it might look like you're providing instructions to dynamically generate the glyphs, you're really only indicating which hard-coded glyphs to use.

The following two glyphs can only be selected as a single entity; however MAN-GIRL-BOY is hard-coded but MAN-BOY-GIRL is not.

👨‍👧‍👦 

$ uparse 👨‍👧‍👦

============================================================
String: '👨‍👧‍👦'
============================================================
👨      U+1F468  MAN
        U+200D   ZERO WIDTH JOINER
👧      U+1F467  GIRL
        U+200D   ZERO WIDTH JOINER
👦      U+1F466  BOY
------------------------------------------------------------

👨‍👦‍👧 

$ uparse 👨‍👦‍👧

============================================================
String: '👨‍👦‍👧'
============================================================
👨      U+1F468  MAN
        U+200D   ZERO WIDTH JOINER
👦      U+1F466  BOY
        U+200D   ZERO WIDTH JOINER
👧      U+1F467  GIRL
------------------------------------------------------------

In PowerShell:

PS C:\Users\ken> $joiner    = [char]::ConvertFromUtf32(0x200D)
PS C:\Users\ken> $man       = [char]::ConvertFromUtf32(0x1F468)
PS C:\Users\ken> $girl      = [char]::ConvertFromUtf32(0x1F467)
PS C:\Users\ken> $boy       = [char]::ConvertFromUtf32(0x1F466)

[download]
PS C:\Users\ken> "$man$joiner$girl$joiner$boy"
👨‍👧‍👦
PS C:\Users\ken> "$man$joiner$boy$joiner$girl"
👨‍👦‍👧

Notice how the BOY remains on the lower-right regardless of whether the GIRL is included or not. The MAN-BOY is a preset glyph; adding GIRL after that just adds another glyph (even if the ZWJ combines these two glyphs into a singly-selectable unit).

Hopefully, at some future point, sequences of glyphs, joiners, modifiers, and so on, will act as an instruction to dynamically generate a new glyph.

— Ken

In reply to Re^4: uparse - Parse Unicode strings by kcott
in thread uparse - Parse Unicode strings by kcott

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