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Flags in Unicode

Unicode uses four mechanisms to represent flags: Single characters, emoji zero width joiner sequences, emoji flag sequences (mostly country flags), and emoji tag sequences (mostly state and province flags).

Single code points
There are eleven standalone flag-related characters in Unicode:

Emoji zero width joiner sequences
Per Unicode Technical Standard #51: "The U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER (ZWJ) can be used between the elements of a sequence of characters to indicate that a single glyph should be presented if available." There are two flag-related emoji ZWJ sequences defined in the emoji-zwj-sequences.txt data file:

Emoji flag sequences
A pair of regional indicator symbols is referred to as an emoji flag sequence (although it represents a specific region, not a specific flag for that region).

Out of the 676 possible pairs of regional indicator symbols (26 × 26), only 270 are considered valid Unicode region codes. These are a subset of the region sequences in the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR):
 * All 256 regular region sequences in the CLDR
 * Two of the 35 macroregion sequences in the CLDR (EU and UN)
 * All 12 deprecated region sequences in the CLDR (strongly discouraged - intended for backward compatibility only)

Emoji tag sequences
Version 5.0 of the Unicode Technical Standard #51 (Unicode Emoji) defines a general mechanism for emoji tag sequences. The initial use of emoji tag sequences is to represent region subdivisions. It is used in conjunction with Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) data to represent flags for country subdivisions. While this mechanism can be used with any CLDR defined territory subdivision, such as California, there are three sequences recommended for general interchange:

List of emoji flag and emoji tag sequences
There are 258 valid emoji flag sequences (excluding deprecated codes) and 4,926 valid emoji tag sequences: