Alan Edwardes

ISO Country Code to Unicode Flag in C♯ and JavaScript

Posted July 22nd, 2018, updated March 15th, 2021 in c-sharp

The Unicode 6.0 spec defines Regional Indicator symbols, which includes a set of flags. Here are the founders of NATO, if your system supports the flag characters (Windows 10 doesn't yet):

🇧🇪 🇨🇦 🇩🇰 🇫🇷 🇮🇸 🇮🇹 🇱🇺 🇳🇱 🇳🇴 🇵🇹 🇬🇧 🇺🇸

To create a flag, take the country ISO code (for example GB), and offset it to the flags Unicode block.

C♯

public static string IsoCountryCodeToFlagEmoji(this string country)
{
    return string.Concat(country.ToUpper().Select(x => char.ConvertFromUtf32(x + 0x1F1A5)));
}

string gb = "gb".IsoCountryCodeToFlagEmoji(); // 🇬🇧
string fr = "fr".IsoCountryCodeToFlagEmoji(); // 🇫🇷

JavaScript

function isoCountryCodeToFlagEmoji(country)
{
   return String.fromCodePoint(...[...country.toUpperCase()].map(c => c.charCodeAt() + 0x1F1A5));
}

let gb = isoCountryCodeToFlagEmoji("gb"); // 🇬🇧
let fr = isoCountryCodeToFlagEmoji("fr"); // 🇫🇷

Tagged flag unicode specification regional indicator symbols nato character windows country