The Regional Indicator Symbols are a set of 26 alphabetic characters (A-Z) in the Universal Character Set intended to be used to encode ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 two-letter country codes in a way that allows optional special treatment.
These were defined as part of the Unicode 6.0 support for emoji, as an alternative to encoding separate characters for each country flag. Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags.[1][2]
They are encoded in the range U+1F1E6 🇦 regional indicator symbol letter a (HTML: 🇦 ) to U+1F1FF 🇿 regional indicator symbol letter z (HTML: 🇿 ) within the Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement block in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane.[3]
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