So, answering the OP, here's one way of posting an emoticon - if you must.

Unicode is an international standard system for encoding (i.e. turning into a code) letters, non-western characters, symbols, hieroglyphs, and pictures.

Every emoticon has a Unicode number which you can look up on the internet. For example the grinning face at the top left of the table on this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticons_(Unicode_block)
is 1F600 (usually written U+1F600) and the devil further along is 1F608. The next row starts 1F610

To post these you type:

😀   😀
😈   😈
😐   😐

The &# prefix and the final semicolon turn it into an html code. The x specifies that it's in hexadecimal - hex 1F600 is decimal 128512 so this works too:

😀 😀

This method should work with any Unicode symbol - e.g. Chinese characters.

BUT - just because you can see it, it doesn't mean everyone else can. It depends on having the appropriate font installed.

There are also lots of sites which will give you the codes - Mr Red has one.