20

I'm playing around with emojis in Swift using Xcode playground for some simple iOS8 apps. For this, I want to create something similar to a unicode/emoji map/description.

In order to do this, I need to have a loop that would allow me to print out a list of emojis. I was thinking of something along these lines

for i in 0x1F601 - 0x1F64F {
    var hex = String(format:"%2X", i)
    println("\u{\(hex)}") //Is there another way to create UTF8 string corresponding to emoji
}

But the println() throws an error 

Expected '}'in \u{...} escape sequence.

Is there a simple way to do this which I am missing?

I understand that not all entries will correspond to an emoji. Also, I'm able create a lookup table with reference from http://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode, but I would like a lazy/easy method of achieving the same.

Pang
  • 9,564
  • 146
  • 81
  • 122
Yogesh
  • 740
  • 2
  • 7
  • 15
  • 1
    I recently wrote a gist available [here](https://gist.github.com/Kametrixom/b2e89e467297a42226fd) which gets all standard unicode emojis from the website, parses them and prints them. Also it prints out all Country code emojis from AA to ZZ. I know you don't want to use networking for that but I guess somebody else could use this. Also you could modify it so that it creates a list of numbers of the emojis which can then be used offline – Kametrixom Aug 10 '15 at 07:44
  • 1
    check this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/60565823/5251783 – Hosny Mar 06 '20 at 14:17

1 Answers1

53

You can loop over those hex values with a Range: 0x1F601...0x1F64F and then create the Strings using a UnicodeScalar:

for i in 0x1F601...0x1F64F {
    guard let scalar = UnicodeScalar(i) else { continue }
    let c = String(scalar)
    print(c)
}

Outputs:

If you want all the emoji, just add another loop over an array of ranges:

// NOTE: These ranges are still just a subset of all the emoji characters;
//       they seem to be all over the place...
let emojiRanges = [
    0x1F601...0x1F64F,
    0x2702...0x27B0,
    0x1F680...0x1F6C0,
    0x1F170...0x1F251
]

for range in emojiRanges {
    for i in range {
        guard let scalar = UnicodeScalar(i) else { continue }
        let c = String(scalar)
        print(c)
    }
}

For those asking, the full list of available emojis can be found here: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

A parsable list of unicode sequences for all emojis can be found in the emoji-sequences.txt file under the directory for the version you're interested in here: http://unicode.org/Public/emoji/

As of 9/15/2021 the latest version of the emoji standard available on Apple devices is 13.1.

Mike S
  • 41,895
  • 11
  • 89
  • 84
  • +1 This is so much better than the weird `CFStringTransform` examples I was playing around with. – Craig Otis Oct 02 '14 at 23:57
  • Great solution @Mike. This makes it so simple yet beautiful. – Yogesh Oct 03 '14 at 09:31
  • 4
    This is great. But where did you find those ranges for the unicode code points? Do these ranges cover all emoji? As of when? – algal Sep 03 '15 at 17:22
  • 1
    @algal I honestly don't remember where I dug those up, but I think I just used the link in the question and grabbed a few ranges from there. As the note in the code says though, that is definitely _not_ a complete list of all the emoji; it's just there to show one way of looping over a set of ranges. – Mike S Sep 03 '15 at 17:30
  • If creating a custom keyboard, I'm assuming it isn't against any policies to use these emojis? – VDog Feb 18 '17 at 09:24
  • I'm curious how you discovered this. How did you find out which hex values were emojis? – nodebase Sep 14 '21 at 17:46