Get Description of Emoji Character

Question

Each Emoji has a description that you can see in Mac OS\'s ⌃⌘Space special character picker. There\'s a list of them here. Is there a way for me to query for th

Answer 1

Swift 3 version of Eric Aya's answer:

let s = "This is a                                                                     

                                                        
            

Answer 2

The Core Foundation function CFStringTransform() has transformations that determine the Unicode standard name for special characters. Example:

let c : Character = "                                                                    

                                                        
            

Answer 3

Martin R's answer using Core Foundation's CFStringTransform() still works, but the key feature actually comes from kCFStringTransformToUnicodeName, and in Swift 2 we can use it simply like this, by bridging with NSString and calling stringByApplyingTransform:

let c: Character = "                                                                    

                                                        
            

Answer 4

With Swift 5, you can use one of the two following ways in order to get the description of an Emoji character.

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#1. Using Unicode.Scalar.Properties's name property

Unicode.Scalar.Properties has a name property. name has the following declaration:

var name: String? { get }

The published name of the scalar.

The Playground code sample below shows how to use name in order to get the published name of a Unicode scalar:

let emoji: Character = "