How to Put a Smiley Into Your UILabel

Sometimes iPhone SDK just makes you smile, things you expect to be difficult turn out to be really simple. Take for example a smiley face :)

NSRange range = {NSNotFound, 0};
NSString *s = @"This is a smiley :) face";

range.location = 0;
range.length = [s length];
s = [s stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@":)"
                                    withString:@"\ue415"
                                       options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch
                                         range:range];

iPhone contains by default a Japanese font, which supports unicode emoji characters. As a result you suddenly have built-in supports for about 460 graphical icons, all of which you can put anywhere as part of any text string!

Here's full list of emoji characters in iPhone. Have fun ;)