Question

How do you specify the heart character in NSSString? I am implementing a network protocol and want to send this as the heartbeat.

This is the Unicode info from character viewer:

Unicode: U+1F493 (U+D83D U+DC93), UTF-8: F0 9F 92 93

Answer 1

The simplest way would be to type it directly into a string constant in Xcode:

NSString *heart = @"";

If you need to convert it to bytes in a specific encoding, use NSData, like this:

// Specify the encoding that you need
NSData* heartData = [heart dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

With an instance of NSData in hand, you can access its bytes and length to copy into the heartbeat message.