SMS Character Set

[NoRomanBatmansAllowed]

Does anybody know what character set an average phone could send over SMS these days?

 

Having information about NA carriers would be nice, but anywhere in the world too would be great!

 

Thanks!

[Noyu]

2 hours ago, bob51zhang said:

but anywhere in the world too would be great!

Philippines - 1600 characters for Huawei P9 (pretty sure it's the same for all smartphones). It'll autoconvert to an MMS if you input more than that.

Do note that a feature phone would register this as 10 texts with 160 characters each.

 

woops completely misunderstood that ahaha

[SquintyG33Rs]

8 minutes ago, Noyu said:

Philippines - 1600 characters for Huawei P9 (pretty sure it's the same for all smartphones). It'll autoconvert to an MMS if you input more than that.

Do note that a feature phone would register this as 10 texts with 160 characters each.

he means character set like ASCII not the number you can put in one message.

 

I don't think there is a set standard. modern android phones and iphones include all their hundreds of emojis and they know exactly which is which but sending them to older phones will result in a blank square. or to a computer software for that matter, like texting through skype or wechat and stuff that have PC clients. though some get around that by setting their own app emoji standard that converts from the phone's to it's own like facebook messenger and discord.

[NoRomanBatmansAllowed]

1 minute ago, SquintyG33Rs said:

 

I don't think there is a set standard. modern android phones and iphones include all their hundreds of emojis and they know exactly which is which but sending them to older phones will result in a blank square. or to a computer software for that matter, like texting through skype or wechat and stuff that have PC clients. though some get around that by setting their own app emoji standard that converts from the phone's to it's own like facebook messenger and discord.

But for a normal phone (newish android OR iphone, doesn't matter) what would it be?

 

I'm thinking of making a project and if I can compress some messages with emojis and stuff.

[SquintyG33Rs]

12 minutes ago, bob51zhang said:

But for a normal phone (newish android OR iphone, doesn't matter) what would it be?

 

I'm thinking of making a project and if I can compress some messages with emojis and stuff.

that's what i'm saying there isn't really a limit on the SMS technology itself. i'm guessing here but say it's stored in 2 bytes per character then there are 65536 possible characters as long as they are defined the same on both ends it will work. the SMS only shares their numerical address in the table. but the only ones that are really Standardized are the alphabet, numbers and the symbols (so like the 2 keyboard "tabs").

 

and like the other guy first said at the top you can fit 160 of those in one message. that's your data cap for an SMS.

 

i'm not sure if i'm helping because i don't know what you mean by project. if you want to redefine some of the characters to make a custom outcome somewhat "encrypted" between 2 specific terminals. a bit like you'd do on old computers from the 80's to code games because graphics were too intensive for the CPU and GPU wasn't a thing really yet. but yeah idk what you're doing man

[Virus__]

Text messages in Australia are capped at 160 characters per message, so if you don't have an unlimited texting plan then a message with 161 characters will be charged as 2 messages.

[Sniperfox47]

To actually answer the OP's question...

 

GSM SMS messages can be sent in one of 3 encodings.

 

The first two, the GSM 7-bit and 8-bit formats are *basically* ASCII with some small tweaks.

 

The second is UCS2 which is functionally identical to Unicode-16, but can also use chorded pairs to represent the larger Unicode sets.

 

UCS2 uses up *far* more encoding space than GSM 7-bit which is why often you'll see simple characters using up 1 "character slot" of the 160, but Unicode characters like Newline or emojis using up several.

[GoodBytes]

5 hours ago, bob51zhang said:

Does anybody know what character set an average phone could send over SMS these days?

 

Having information about NA carriers would be nice, but anywhere in the world too would be great!

 

Thanks!

There is no limit by your phone and the receiving end phone.

If your message is too long, it is fragmented by your phone, and reassembled by the receiving phone,although your carrier will see multiple SMS being sent for 1 long message, and will charge you, if you were charge per SMS, equivalent. So, if your message was cut as 2 SMSs, they'll charge you 2x SMS, again, if that was the case.

 

SMS max length varies based on the type of message:

• ASCII characters: 160 (the reality is 140 character the limit. This is because it can do GSM7 compression. Allowing to turn 8-bit chars into 7-bit ones)
• Unicode or binary (image, sound, etc.): 140 character/binary (there are no compression)
• UCS-2 will depends if it is in 8-bit mode or 16-bit mode, and that depends on the language.