The regional indicator symbols are a set of 26 alphabetic Unicode characters (A-Z) intended to be used to encode ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 two-letter country codes in a way that allows optional special treatment.
These were defined as part of the Unicode 6.0 support for emoji, as an alternative to encoding separate characters for each country flag. Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded.
They are encoded in the range U+1F1E6 ? regional indicator symbol letter a (HTML 🇦) to U+1F1FF ? regional indicator symbol letter z (HTML 🇿) within the Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement block in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane.
Video Regional Indicator Symbol
Emoji flag sequences
A pair of regional indicator symbols is referred to as an emoji flag sequence (although it represents a specific region, not a specific flag for that region).
Out of the 676 possible pairs of regional indicator symbols (26 × 26), only 270 are considered valid Unicode region codes. These are a subset of the region sequences in the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR):
- All 256 regular region sequences in the CLDR
- Two of the 35 macroregion sequences in the CLDR (EU and UN)
- All 12 deprecated region sequences in the CLDR (strongly discouraged - intended for backward compatibility only)
A separate mechanism (emoji tag sequences) is used for regional flags, such as Scotland or California It uses U+1F3F4 ? WAVING BLACK FLAG and formatting tag characters instead of regional indicator symbols.
Maps Regional Indicator Symbol
Font test
This is a demonstration of how these characters appear in your browser individually: ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?.
Unicode Block
Background
In 2007 a draft proposal was presented to the Unicode Technical Committee to encode emoji symbols, specifically those in widespread use on mobile phones by Japanese telecommunications companies DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank. The proposed symbols included ten national flags: China (??), Germany (??), Spain (??), France (??), the UK (??), Italy (??), Japan (??), South Korea (??), Russia (??), and the United States (??). Encoding these flags but not other countries' flags was considered, by some, as prejudicial. One rejected solution was to encode the ten flags but call them "EMOJI COMPATIBILITY SYMBOL-n" and represent them visually in the Standard as "EC n" instead of showing the flags they represent. Another rejected solution would have allocated 676 codepoints (26 x 26) for each possible two letter combination of A-Z. They would represent political entities based on ISO 3166 such as "FR" for France or Internet ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) such as "EU" for the European Union.
The accepted solution was to add 26 characters for letters used for the representation of regional indicators, which used in pairs would represent the ten national flags and possible future extensions. Per the Unicode Standard "the main purpose of such [regional indicator symbol] pairs is to provide unambiguous roundtrip mappings to certain characters used in the emoji core sets" specifically the ten national flags: ??, ??, ??, ??, ??, ??, ??, ??, ??, and ??.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments