Android Get Country Emoji Flag Using Locale

Question

I have seen that since Lollipop, Android has built in Emoji flags for different countries. Is it possible to use the devices locale to retrieve the Emoji flag for that country?

I wanted to insert the Emoji flag into a TextView which contains the user's location.

Answer 1

Emoji is a Unicode symbols. Based on the Unicode character table Emoji flags consist of 26 alphabetic Unicode characters (A-Z) intended to be used to encode ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 two-letter country codes (wiki).

That means it is possible to split two-letter country code and convert each A-Z letter to regional indicator symbol letter:

private String localeToEmoji(Locale locale) {
    String countryCode = locale.getCountry();
    int firstLetter = Character.codePointAt(countryCode, 0) - 0x41 + 0x1F1E6;
    int secondLetter = Character.codePointAt(countryCode, 1) - 0x41 + 0x1F1E6;
    return new String(Character.toChars(firstLetter)) + new String(Character.toChars(secondLetter));
}

Or in Kotlin, for example (assuming UTF-8):

val Locale.flagEmoji: String
    get() {
      val firstLetter = Character.codePointAt(country, 0) - 0x41 + 0x1F1E6
      val secondLetter = Character.codePointAt(country, 1) - 0x41 + 0x1F1E6
      return String(Character.toChars(firstLetter)) + String(Character.toChars(secondLetter))
    }

Where 0x41 represents uppercase A letter and 0x1F1E6 is REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER A in the Unicode table.

Note: This code example is simplified and doesn't have required checks related to country code, that could be not available inside the locale.