White Smiley

☺

This character has no named entity, so the numeric form is the one to use.

\263A

For a content property in a ::before or ::after rule. No semicolon, and mind the trailing space.

\u263A

Valid in a JavaScript or JSON string literal, so it survives files and pipelines that are not UTF-8 clean.

\u263A

The escape for a Python string literal.

%E2%98%BA

Percent-encoded UTF-8, for a query string or a path segment.

E2 98 BA

3 bytes on the wire. Seeing these as separate garbled characters means something decoded them as single-byte text.