I encountered some real world unicode/emoji breakdown recently. I set my surname in a webapp to an emoji country flag because I needed a way to communicate where I was. Elsewhere in the app, it showed surnames as just their initial, e.g. "John S". There, mine showed as a featureless black flag rather than the flag I set. Presumably because that is the first codepoint of several that make up the flag.
> There, mine showed as a featureless black flag rather than the flag I set. Presumably because that is the first codepoint of several that make up the flag.
The country flags are each made of two Unicode code points, which Unicode calls Regional Indicator Symbols. There are twenty six, one for each of the Latin capital letters A through Z. These are used to encode a flag by writing the ISO two letter country code from ISO-3166-1 e.g. F + R is France, you get a French flag.
Given your black flag experience, and the fact this is an English language forum, I'd guess maybe you wanted a flag for some entity that isn't a UN member state or some sort of recognised similar entity (e.g. the European flag EU symbolising the continent of Europe) and thus doesn't have an ISO two letter code, such as California or Wales. Those are built from a waving black flag plus their long ISO-3166-2 region code
