[SOLVED] Swift turn a country code into a emoji flag via unicode

Swift turn a country code into a emoji flag via unicode

I'm looking for a quick way to turn something like:

let germany = "DE"

into

let flag = "\u{1f1e9}\u{1f1ea}"

ie, what's the mapping of D to 1f1e9 and E to 1f1ea I was looking at .utf8 for the string, but this returns an integer.

FWIW my general goal is to be able to take an arbitrary country code and get the corresponding emoji flag.

EDIT: I'm also fine with just holding a table that does this mapping if its available somewhere. I googled around but didn't find it.

Solution

Here's a general formula for turning a two-letter country code into its emoji flag:

func flag(country:String) -> String {
    let base = 127397
    var usv = String.UnicodeScalarView()
    for i in country.utf16 {
        usv.append(UnicodeScalar(base + Int(i)))
    }
    return String(usv)
}

let s = flag("DE")

EDIT Ooops, no need to pass through the nested String.UnicodeScalarView struct. It turns out that String has an append method for precisely this purpose. So:

func flag(country:String) -> String { 
    let base : UInt32 = 127397
    var s = ""
    for v in country.unicodeScalars {
        s.append(UnicodeScalar(base + v.value))
    }
    return s
}

EDIT Oooops again, in Swift 3 they took away the ability to append a UnicodeScalar to a String, and they made the UnicodeScalar initializer failable (Xcode 8 seed 6), so now it looks like this:

func flag(country:String) -> String {
    let base : UInt32 = 127397
    var s = ""
    for v in country.unicodeScalars {
        s.unicodeScalars.append(UnicodeScalar(base + v.value)!)
    }
    return String(s)
}