emoji flags from country codes

Here’s a nifty snippet to automatically calculate the expected flag emoji of any country, based on its country code

const getFlagEmoji = (countryCode) => countryCode
  .toUpperCase()
  .split('')
  .map((char) =>  String.fromCodePoint(127397 + char.charCodeAt()))

// A slightly faster version (https://jsperf.app/peluko)
function getFlagEmoji(countryCode) {
  return [...countryCode.toUpperCase()]
    .map(char => String.fromCodePoint(127397 + char.charCodeAt()))
    .reduce((a, b) => `${a}${b}`);
}

Any flag emoji is actually just a combination of its country code’s two unicode characters. For instance, with Switzerland, we would need the characters CH, which would be 127464 and 127469.

Breakdown of the “fabrication process”: we can get the UTF-16 code index from any character using charCodeAt. The UTF-16 A is positioned at 65, and we have subtracted this from the region A character index 127462, resulting in the hardcoded 127397 value (127462 - 65). To get the correct flag emoji index, we simply add the resulting index.
We then use String.fromCodePoint to return an emoji character for the computed unicode points.

You can test it out in your console on this page!

getFlagEmoji('SE') // 🇸🇪
getFlagEmoji('dk') // 🇩🇰
getFlagEmoji('ee') // 🇪🇪
``

<script>
window.shorter = (countryCode) => countryCode
  .toUpperCase()
  .split('')
  .map((char) =>  String.fromCodePoint(127397 + char.charCodeAt()))

window.getFlagEmoji = function getFlagEmoji(countryCode) {
  const codePoints = countryCode
    .toUpperCase()
    .split('')
    .map((char) =>  127397 + char.charCodeAt())
  return String.fromCodePoint(...codePoints)
}
</script>