SMS remains a very popular medium. Its advantage: universality. Any mobile phone owner can receive an SMS, whereas by using a dedicated application, the sender and recipient must have the same application. Popular, SMS nevertheless has some restrictions. A limit of characters and possibilities Widely used for implementing marketing campaigns and relatively inexpensive , the short message service is inherently designed to be brief. In fact, its encoding more precisely determines its maximum number of characters. No encoding, no computing What is encoding? Everything that has a digital life, text, photo, image, video or sound is translated into lines of code.
Thus, each character of our alphabet, the numbers, the accents are written in code. At the beginning of computing, a first American standard using hexadecimal characters appeared: ASCII codes. Then, a long work of universalization of the codes took place, offering greater flexibility. Complex characters, the alphabets of other cultures, which it was not possible costa rica phone number data to transcribe in ASCII, are now supported by standards shared throughout the world. SMS: 140 bytes, but a variable number of characters An SMS message is limited to 140 bytes. Depending on how it is encoded, this represents a variable number of characters. The preferred encoding type in the Western world is currently GSM-7.
It has the advantage of using only 7 bits for a character, i.e. a maximum number of 160 characters for a message (140/8*, a byte comprising 8 bits). But it has some limitations: while it supports Latin alphabets, it has much more difficulty with non-Latin languages. The encoding becomes cumbersome to manage and we then favor another format. > See the list of characters not supported on SMS Partner from the platform or the SMS API. UFT-16, more suitable for non-Latin languages When you want to correspond by SMS internationally , the alphabet can sometimes be changed. For example, in Chinese, Arabic or a language with Cyrillic characters, the UFT-16 format comes into play.
It is heavier, since it takes at least 2 bytes to write a character. In UFT-16, an SMS will therefore never exceed 70 characters (140/2). It also allows you to integrate emoticons into your messages (and it really makes a difference...) Are you looking for a tool to count your characters in GSM-7 or UTF-16 format? Discover our character counter The encoding dilemma: richer, but shorter? Why do we continue to use GMS-7 mainly? For obvious reasons of economy. Even if individuals now benefit from unlimited packages that make the price of an SMS invisible, sending in bulk has a cost, and doubling the size of the message doubles the cost. If SMS are limited to 160 or 70 characters, sending longer texts is no problem.