Regional Indicator

RI

Technical/Unicode

Paired Unicode letters (U+1F1E6 to U+1F1FF) that form country flag emoji when combined according to ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes.

Flag emoji use a clever encoding system: 26 Regional Indicator symbols correspond to letters A-Z. When two are paired to form a valid ISO 3166-1 country code, platforms render them as that country's flag.

For example, ๐Ÿ‡ฐ (U+1F1F0, RI K) + ๐Ÿ‡ท (U+1F1F7, RI R) = ๐Ÿ‡ฐ๐Ÿ‡ท (South Korea). This means no new code points are needed when countries change โ€” only the ISO mapping and platform rendering need updating.

There are 258 flag sequences defined in Unicode. On platforms that don't support flag rendering (like Windows), the two Regional Indicator letters are shown as letter pairs instead.

Related Terms

Code Point Code Point
A unique numerical value assigned to each character in the Unicode standard, written in the format U+XXXX (e.g., U+1F600 for ๐Ÿ˜€). Emoji Sequence Emoji Sequence
An ordered set of one or more Unicode code points that together represent a single emoji character. Tag Sequence Tag Sequence
Emoji flag sequences using special tag characters (U+E0020 to U+E007E) to represent subdivision flags like England, Scotland, and Wales.

Related Tools

๐Ÿ” Sequence Analyzer Sequence Analyzer
Decode ZWJ sequences, skin tone modifiers, keycap sequences, and flag pairs into individual components. ๐Ÿ”ข Unicode Lookup Unicode Lookup
Enter a codepoint like U+1F600 and get the emoji, encoding details, UTF-8/16 bytes, and HTML entities.

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