Flag Emoji

Hi Daniel,

There aren't flag emojis and there problably won't be. The reason is pretty simple and can't be worked around in any satysfying way:

Country flags aren't actually a single unicode character, but a combination of unicode characters that are interpreted as a flag. When you receive the country flag equivalent of "US", it is interpreted as the United States flag. It means that it's up to each emoji implementation to interpret flag codes, which means that there is a potential PR nightmare to deal with in case a country isn't recognized internationaly.

Should microsoft decide to recognize the Israelian flag ? The Palestinian flag ? Taiwan flag ? How is Microsoft supposed to decide what flag to display or not if part of a country decides to declare independance ? Some companies have decided to represent all flags, some have decided to display different flags depending on where the user is located, an Microsoft decided to display none.

Hi Daniel,

There aren't flag emojis and there problably won't be. The reason is pretty simple and can't be worked around in any satysfying way:

Country flags aren't actually a single unicode character, but a combination of unicode characters that are interpreted as a flag. When you receive the country flag equivalent of "US", it is interpreted as the United States flag. It means that it's up to each emoji implementation to interpret flag codes, which means that there is a potential PR nightmare to deal with in case a country isn't recognized internationaly.

Should microsoft decide to recognize the Israelian flag ? The Palestinian flag ? Taiwan flag ? How is Microsoft supposed to decide what flag to display or not if part of a country decides to declare independance ? Some companies have decided to represent all flags, some have decided to display different flags depending on where the user is located, an Microsoft decided to display none.

Hi Daniel, There aren't flag emojis and there problably won't be. The reason is pretty simple and can't be worked around in any satysfying way: Country flags aren't actually a single unicode character, but a combination of unicode characters that are interpreted as a flag. When you receive the country flag equivalent of "US", it is interpreted as the United States flag. It means that it's up to each emoji implementation to interpret flag codes, which means that there is a potential PR nightmare to deal with in case a country isn't recognized internationaly. Should microsoft decide to recognize the Israelian flag ? The Palestinian flag ? Taiwan flag ? How is Microsoft supposed to decide what flag to display or not if part of a country decides to declare independance ? Some companies have decided to represent all flags, some have decided to display different flags depending on where the user is located, an Microsoft decided to display none.

The flag codes are not up to be interpreted, they are decided by The Unicode Consortium and so means there is no "potential PR nightmare" when you simply follow the spec. https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f3f3

For example, Microsoft doesn't seem to have any trouble with implementing and displaying the multi character LGBT flag ��‍��(censored on this forum). Of which is illegal and deeply frowned upon in Russia.

When is it a "potential PR nightmare" and when is it not?

What I'm saying is that it is better to placate a few countries by having special conditions for displaying certain pictograms than to not pleasing anyone and breaking a spec that is used internationally on the web!

Why is that not available, when I can go to https://emojipedia.org/emoji/%F0%9F%87%AC%F0%9F%87%A7/ and copy the ���� string to paste here? So they have actively chosen not to include the flag codes in the emoji picker, even though it is clearly part of the emoji spec. 

Why is that not available, when I can go to https://emojipedia.org/emoji/%F0%9F%87%AC%F0%9F%87%A7/ and copy the ���� string to paste here? So they have actively chosen not to include the flag codes in the emoji picker, even though it is clearly part of the emoji spec. 

Your paste did not work.

They are apparently censored on this forum.

There is no "Israelian" flag and no Taiwan flag either.

What do you call this?: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f1ee_1f1f1

Or this?: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f1f9_1f1fc

Non-flags? They're in the emoji spec. They are internationally recognized countries.

Can't you just download some flag emojis?

Windows can't have everything that everyone thinks it should have.