Swift turn a country code into a emoji flag via unicode

Question

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

let germany = \"DE\" 

into

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


        

Answer 1

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)
}