Unexpected length values on some emojis?

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Posted on by AM-18061812-0 Microsoft Employee

When calling the length method on a string, I noticed that it returns a length of 2 for the 🚀 rocket ship emoji. Is there a way to work around this without having to do complex character calculations to know which one will be length 2 or length 1?

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Vish WR 3,748 on at

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@AM-18061812-0

The length() function in Power Automate counts UTF-16 code units, not visible characters. Emoji like 🚀 sit outside the Basic Multilingual Plane and require two code units (a surrogate pair), so they return 2. This is expected behaviour, not a bug.

There is no native workaround in Power Automate expressions today. The expression engine has no concept of grapheme clusters or visible character count.

If you need to enforce character limits on inputs that may contain emoji, the cleanest option is to handle that validation in Power Apps before the data reaches the flow, where you have more control over how characters are counted.

Vishnu WR

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chiaraalina 2,425 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @AM-18061812-0

As a workaround you could do this:

length(replace('Hello 🚀', '🚀', 'X'))

This yields the human-expected count. In the above, “Hello 🚀” becomes “Hello X”, which length() correctly reports as 7. So you swap surrogate-pair emojis with single character, so you get the correct length.

Hope it helps!

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Haque 3,653 on at

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Hi @AM-18061812-0

The standard length() counts UTF-16 code units, so emojis like 🚀 count as 2. There is no simple built-in way in Power Automate to count user-perceived characters (grapheme clusters).

Expensive though - if you need exact character counts including emojis, consider calling an Azure Function or external API that uses Unicode-aware libraries (e.g., ICU or JavaScript with Array.from()). Otherise, I agree with chiaraalina .

I am sure some clues I tried to give. If these clues help to resolve the issue brought you by here, please don't forget to check the box Does this answer your question? At the same time, I am pretty sure you have liked the response!

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