swift - 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 this description in code (short of entering them all into a Struct)?

I'd like to do something like:

let ??: Character = "??"
let ??desc: String = ??.description

and have ??desc resolve to "SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES".

Answer 1

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

let c : Character = "??"

let cfstr = NSMutableString(string: String(c)) as CFMutableString
var range = CFRangeMake(0, CFStringGetLength(cfstr))
CFStringTransform(cfstr, &range, kCFStringTransformToUnicodeName, false)
print(cfstr)

Output:

N{SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES}

See http://nshipster.com/cfstringtransform/ for more information about CFStringTransform().