Playing cards in Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the handling of fonts and symbols. Within it is a set of code points representing playing cards, and another depicting the French card suits.

The Miscellaneous Symbols block contains the following, at U+2660–2667:

Unicode's Playing Cards block (U+1F0A0–1F0FF) has code points for the 52 cards of the standard French deck plus the Knight (Ace, 2–10, Jack, Knight, Queen, and King for each of the four suits), three jokers (red, black, and white), the back of a card, The Fool, and generic trump cards numbered 1–21. The depiction of these trump cards in most supporting fonts is based on the Bourgeois Tarot.

Four Knights of the Tarot deck were included when the Playing Cards Unicode block was added in Unicode 6.0 (U+1F0A0–1F0FF). In Unicode 7.0, a red joker, a fool, and twenty-one generic trump cards were added to the Playing Cards block, with the reference description being not the Italian-suited Tarot de Marseille or its derivatives (which are often used in cartomancy) but the French Tarot Nouveau used to play Jeu de tarot, which is used for divination less frequently.

The Playing Cards block contains one emoji: U+1F0CF 🃏 PLAYING CARD BLACK JOKER.

The emoji presentation sequences refine and colorize the text presentation of the playing card suits. ♠︎♥︎♦︎♣︎ becomes ♠️♥️♦️♣️. This was done by appending the U+FE0F code point to the textual code points shown far above. For example, the black heart suit ♥ becomes the red heart emoji by ♥️. Conversely, the black heart suit can be coerced by appending U+FE0E with ♥︎. These hold for each suit.

There is an emoji for Japanese hanafuda (flower playing cards): U+1F3B4 🎴 FLOWER PLAYING CARDS. The emoji can stand for any hanafuda card but it is usually depicted as the Moon card specifically.