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 by 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.[1][2] The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded.[3]
They are encoded in the range U+1F1E6 🇦 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER A to U+1F1FF 🇿 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER Z within the Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement block in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane.[4]
- ^ Andrew West. "What's new in Unicode 6.0". Babelstone. Archived from the original on 2014-04-06. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- ^ Michael Everson and Ken Whistler. "N3727: Proposal to encode Regional Indicator Symbols in the UCS" (PDF). Working Group Document, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 and UTC. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- ^ "Unicode FAQ: Emoji and Dingbats". The Unicode Consortium. 2009-10-28. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- ^ "Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement, Range 1F100 - 1F1FF, The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0" (PDF). Unicode Consortium. 2010. Retrieved 2014-08-18.