How to get the name of an emoji in Swift

If you find yourself building an emoji picker or maybe a reactions UI, it is likely that you'll need to display the names of each emoji. Many solutions to this involve maintaining a dictionary between the emoji and their names, but there is a way to get the system names for each emoji using kCFStringTransformToUnicodeName. The example below uses the CFStringTransform API to obtain the name of the emoji in the input string. It then parses the human readable name from the output.

The transform returns the format \N{AIRPLANE} for each emoji that is present in the input string. In this example, we assume that only one emoji is present, but this could easily be adapted to support multiple emoji by replacing the string split with a map operation.

func getName(for emoji: String) -> String? {
    let string = NSMutableString(string: String(emoji))
    var range = CFRangeMake(0, CFStringGetLength(string))

    CFStringTransform(string, &range, kCFStringTransformToUnicodeName, false)

    guard let firstName = string.components(separatedBy: "\\N").first else {
        return nil
    }

    return firstName.trimmingPrefix("\\N")
        .trimmingCharacters(in: .punctuationCharacters)
        .capitalized
}