How is a flag emoji built from a country code?

Each letter is mapped to a Regional Indicator Symbol (A = U+1F1E6 … Z = U+1F1FF). Placing the two indicators for a valid ISO 3166-1 code next to each other tells the renderer to draw that country's flag.

Which codes are valid?

Two-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes, like GB, US, FR, JP or DE. The tool accepts any two-letter combination, but only assigned codes actually render as a recognised flag on your device.

Why does my flag show as two letters instead?

If the platform font has no glyph for that flag — or the code is unassigned — it falls back to showing the two boxed Regional Indicator letters. England, Scotland and Wales flags use a different tag-sequence mechanism, not alpha-2 codes.

Can I convert several codes at once?

Yes. Separate codes with spaces, commas or new lines and the tool converts each one, keeping the separators so the output stays readable.

Does the decoder handle a string of flags?

Yes. In decode mode it scans for pairs of Regional Indicator Symbols and outputs the matching two-letter codes, leaving any other characters in place.

Country Code to Flag Emoji

What this tool does

This converter maps ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes to flag emojis and back. Type GB to get 🇬🇧, US to get 🇺🇸, or paste a row of flags to recover their codes. It is useful for building country pickers, localisation tables, social bios, and travel content.

How it works

There is no dedicated “flag” code point for each country. Instead, a flag emoji is a pair of Regional Indicator Symbols. Each letter A–Z has an indicator at 0x1F1E6 + (letter − A). To build the flag for a code like GB, the tool emits the indicator for G followed by the indicator for B; the renderer recognises the valid country code and draws the flag.

Decoding reverses the process: the tool walks the string by Unicode code point, and whenever it finds two consecutive Regional Indicator Symbols it converts each back to its letter and joins them into a two-letter code.

Tips and notes

Only assigned ISO codes render as flags. An invalid pair such as XX will display as two boxed letters on most platforms.
Codes are caseless: gb, Gb and GB all produce 🇬🇧.
Sub-national flags (England 🏴, Scotland 🏴) are not alpha-2 codes — they use a separate tag-sequence encoding and are outside the scope of this two-letter converter.
Each indicator is an astral code point occupying two UTF-16 units, so the decoder iterates by code point rather than by string index.