How to list (almost) all emojis in Swift for iOS 8 without using any form of lookup tables?

Question

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.

Solution

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.

Comments

[Kametrixom]

I recently wrote a gist available here 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

[Craig Otis]

+1 This is so much better than the weird CFStringTransform examples I was playing around with.

[Yogesh]

Great solution @Mike. This makes it so simple yet beautiful.

[algal]

This is great. But where did you find those ranges for the unicode code points? Do these ranges cover all emoji? As of when?

[Mike S]

@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.

[VDog]

If creating a custom keyboard, I'm assuming it isn't against any policies to use these emojis?

[nodebase]

I'm curious how you discovered this. How did you find out which hex values were emojis?