Just type them the old way. E.g colon dash right bracket. :-)
They are converted.
It makes me laugh that the new version of the keyboard on my android tablet has a key to switch to a smiley palette. The symbol on the key to do this is a smiley. There are 185 weird symbols and fifteen Smileys. The Smileys are nothing but the normal ASCII character combos: =-O :-P ;-) :-( :-) :-! :-$ B-) :O
:-D
O:-)
Not sure if this board will let some of the others appear, but they include zodiac signs, Chinese characters, all sorts of junk...... 21 below....
♿♻
