What's the UITableView index magnifying glass character?

Question

In Apple\'s iPhone apps (like Contacts), they have a nice magnifying glass icon at the top of the table view index. Since the table view index API is character-based, I assu

Answer 1

There already is an existing UTF codepoint for the magnifying glass. It is U+1F50D. However it's slightly tricky getting Xcode to recognize this number. According to Apple's String Programming Guide the UTF bits should be split into two UTF-16 surrogate pairs (0xD83D, 0xDD0D). Check with this surrogate pair calculator for reference.

An NSString instance with the contents of the surrogate pair can be obtained with:

[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%C%C", 0xD83D, 0xDD0D];