Get Description of Emoji Character

Question

Each Emoji has a description that you can see in Mac OS's ⌃⌘Space special character picker. There's a list of them here. Is there a way for me to query for this description in code (short of entering them all into a Struct)?

I'd like to do something like:

let 😄: Character = "😄"
let 😄desc: String = 😄.description

and have 😄desc resolve to "SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES".

Answer 1

The Core Foundation function CFStringTransform() has transformations that determine the Unicode standard name for special characters. Example:

let c : Character = "😄"

let cfstr = NSMutableString(string: String(c)) as CFMutableString
var range = CFRangeMake(0, CFStringGetLength(cfstr))
CFStringTransform(cfstr, &range, kCFStringTransformToUnicodeName, false)
print(cfstr)

Output:

\N{SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES}

See http://nshipster.com/cfstringtransform/ for more information about CFStringTransform().

Answer 2

Martin R's answer using Core Foundation's CFStringTransform() still works, but the key feature actually comes from kCFStringTransformToUnicodeName, and in Swift 2 we can use it simply like this, by bridging with NSString and calling stringByApplyingTransform:

let c: Character = "😄"
if let result = (String(c) as NSString)
    .stringByApplyingTransform(
        String(kCFStringTransformToUnicodeName),
        reverse: false) {
    print(result)
}

\N{SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES}

The same for a String:

let s: String = "This is a 😄"
if let result = (s as NSString)
    .stringByApplyingTransform(
        String(kCFStringTransformToUnicodeName),
        reverse: false) {
    print(result)
}

This is a \N{SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES}