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Fun with Emoji in SSMS

Solomon Rutzky shares a method to generate any Unicode character in SQL Server Management Studio:

I used to go to the Emoticons (Emoji) 1F600—1F64F page of unicode-table.com to copy and paste characters, code points, or check the encoding chart at the bottom of each character page (the “hex” column of both “UTF-16BE” and “UTF-16LE” rows have proven most useful).
But not anymore. Now, I just hit:   Ctrl + 0.

When I do that, I get a list of 188,657 code points. Each row contains the official code point value (“U+HHHH”), the integer value, the hex value (“0xHHHH”), the character itself, the UTF-16 Little Endian byte sequence (how it is actually stored, and what you get if you convert an NVARCHAR value to VARBINARY), the surrogate pair values, the T-SQL notation (which does not require using an _SC or _140_ collation), the HTML notation (“&#xHHHH;”), and finally the C-style notation (“\xHHHH” ; used for C / C++ / C# / Java / etc). I can copy and paste any of those values and use them in queries, emails, blog posts, .NET code, and so on.

Click through to see how Solomon does this.