This presentation explains the various ways in which JavaScript relies on Unicode, what the consequences are for JavaScript developers, and how ECMAScript 6 will make our lives a bit easier in this regard.

First off, the basics of Unicode are explained. Once that’s out of the way, I’ll talk a little bit about different character encodings, only to determine the character encoding that JavaScript uses internally (which is kind of a mixture between UCS-2/UTF-16).

Then we’ll explore the various consequences of JavaScript exposing “characters” according to UCS-2/UTF-16, and I’ll explain why it can be problematic.

Finally, I’ll present robust ECMAScript 5-compatible workarounds to the issues encountered, and explain how ECMAScript 6 will make it easier to support full Unicode in JavaScript strings and regular expressions.