Did you know you can use most emoticons in text objects?

Most emoticons are just unicode characters. Using them as characters in Matlab is as simple as finding their numeric representation and then converting the numeric value back to character. Not all emoticons are convertible in Matlab.

Here's a secret message with emoticons. Use char(x) to decode it.

x = [79 77 71 33 32 55357 56878 32 104 97 118 101 32 121 111 ...
    117 32 117 112 100 97 116 101 100 32 116 111 32 77 97 116 ...
    108 97 98 32 55358 56595 32 114 50 48 50 49 97 32 121 101 116 32 8265];

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

fig = figure('MenuBar','none','Color', [0 .62 .376]);  % Shamrock green
ax = axes(fig,'Units','Normalized','Position',[0 0 1 1]);
axis(ax,'off')
axis(ax,'equal')
hold(ax,'on')
xlim(ax,[-1,1]); ylim(ax,[-1,1])
text(ax, 0, 0, char(9752), 'VerticalAlignment','middle','HorizontalAlignment','center','FontSize', 200)
str = num2cell('Happy St Patrick''s day!');
th = linspace(-pi/2,pi/2,numel(str)); 
txtHandle = text(ax,sin(th)*.8, cos(th)*.8, str, 'VerticalAlignment','middle','HorizontalAlignment','center','FontSize', 25);
set(txtHandle,{'rotation'}, num2cell(rad2deg(-th')))
thr = 0.017;
rotateCCW = @(xyz)([cos(thr) -sin(thr) 0; sin(thr), cos(thr), 0; 0 0 1]*xyz.').';
while all(isvalid(txtHandle))
    newposition = rotateCCW(vertcat(txtHandle.Position)); 
    set(txtHandle,{'position'}, mat2cell(newposition,ones(numel(txtHandle),1),3), ...
        {'rotation'}, num2cell([txtHandle.Rotation].'+thr*180/pi))
    drawnow()
end