Unfortunately, to encode a character
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 10:31 am
All telecom operators (including Twilio) charge for your SMS messages per segment, so this is something to watch out for to control your costs. Encoding: GSM-7 and USC-2, what’s that? Encoding is a computer standard for transporting letters, numbers, and symbols over the telephone network. In the case of SMS, 2 standards are used: The GSM-7 standard The USC-2 standard The GSM-7 standard allows a maximum number of characters to be sent per message: 160 characters or 153 per segment beyond 160 characters.
Unfortunately, to encode a character in 7 bits, this results in 128 possibilities, phone number philippines therefore 128 characters. You will tell me: the alphabet has 26 characters, 10 numbers and a few punctuation characters, we are generous? Well, for the Anglo-Saxons, it is the case. For us Latins, it is less obvious. In many languages, we use characters that are both useful and folkloric, such as: the circumflex accent (^) on the e, a, o the c cedilla (ç) the e in the o (œ) the German eszett (ß) the reversed ? of the Spanish (¿) all emojis:
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
… etc.
The table of characters supported by GSM-7 encoding is available here GSM-7 table If you want to use characters not present in this encoding table, then your SMS will be converted to USC-2 format. The impact is then a significant reduction in the size of your segments: from 160 to 70 characters. How to know the number of segments in a message Obviously, now you would like to know how to simply calculate the number of segments of an SMS message to send.
Twilio offers a simple web tool that allows you to determine the type of encoding that will be used depending on the characters to be sent, but above all to know the number of segments that will be necessary. This tool is available here: h hub.io/message-segment-calculator/ Messaging Segment Calculator Twilio's Smart Encoding We have seen that GSM-7 encoding allows you to send more characters per message. However, it may happen that your message accidentally includes unicode characters.
Unfortunately, to encode a character in 7 bits, this results in 128 possibilities, phone number philippines therefore 128 characters. You will tell me: the alphabet has 26 characters, 10 numbers and a few punctuation characters, we are generous? Well, for the Anglo-Saxons, it is the case. For us Latins, it is less obvious. In many languages, we use characters that are both useful and folkloric, such as: the circumflex accent (^) on the e, a, o the c cedilla (ç) the e in the o (œ) the German eszett (ß) the reversed ? of the Spanish (¿) all emojis:
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
… etc.The table of characters supported by GSM-7 encoding is available here GSM-7 table If you want to use characters not present in this encoding table, then your SMS will be converted to USC-2 format. The impact is then a significant reduction in the size of your segments: from 160 to 70 characters. How to know the number of segments in a message Obviously, now you would like to know how to simply calculate the number of segments of an SMS message to send.
Twilio offers a simple web tool that allows you to determine the type of encoding that will be used depending on the characters to be sent, but above all to know the number of segments that will be necessary. This tool is available here: h hub.io/message-segment-calculator/ Messaging Segment Calculator Twilio's Smart Encoding We have seen that GSM-7 encoding allows you to send more characters per message. However, it may happen that your message accidentally includes unicode characters.