Emoji iCons are not displaying correctly when read from plist

I am trying to read some开发者_如何学Python text from a plist file and display it to the users in alert box.

When I build the string using this code, everything works (users sees Hello with a smily icon):

NSString *hello = @"Hello \ue415";

but when I get the string from plist, using this code, uses sees "Hello \ue415":

NString *hello =  (NSString *)[pageLiteratureDic objectForKey:litratureKey];

Do I have to encode string differently? Any help or pointers will be much appreciated... everyone love emojis ;)

You shouldn't literally type "\ue415" as text into the plist file. \u.... is an escape sequence in the syntax of strings and characters in the C language. The string itself does not contain backslash and "u" and whatever, it contains just 1 character, the Unicode character at the codepoint 0xe415. If you want to save that in a plist, you have to manually type that one Unicode character in there yourself, making sure to use whatever encoding that is required of a plist (maybe utf-8 or utf-16, not sure). Alternately, you can write a program that creates a plist from that string, and then copy and paste whatever is in that plist file over to your file.

In the plist, instead of "Hello \ue415" try using the smily face character explicitly as in "Hello :)". Just cut and paste the smily character over the unicode code. The reading of the plist is probably escaping the backslash and stopping the interpretation as a unicode character.