My characters were transformed

An SMS does not use Unicode by default but a reduced alphabet, fixed in 1988 by the GSM standard. Characters that do not appear in it must therefore be converted, substituted or erased, which explains why a message sometimes arrives different from what you entered.

The causes, from the most common to the rarest

1. 1

   Accents become plain letters

   To keep the message in GSM-7 and preserve the 160-character limit, accented letters outside the alphabet are reduced to their unaccented version.

2. 2

   Emojis are erased

   An emoji would switch the whole message to UCS-2 and bring the limit down to 70 characters: it is therefore removed before departure.

3. 3

   Typographic punctuation is converted

   Curly quotes and long dashes, typical of a copy-paste from a word processor, are reduced to their simple equivalents.

4. 4

   Some characters weigh two places

   The signs ^ { } \ [ ~ ] | as well as the EUR symbol exist in GSM-7 but count double, which reduces the available length accordingly.

Steps to follow

1. 1

   Anticipate thanks to the counter

   The character counter highlights risky characters before sending and announces the encoding that will be applied.

2. 2

   Write directly in the form

   A copy-paste from a word-processing program imports typographic quotes and dashes that will be converted.

3. 3

   Turn emojis into words

   The meaning stays the same, and the message keeps its 160 characters instead of dropping to 70.

4. 4

   Re-read the converted version

   The form shows exactly what will go out: this is indeed the text the recipient will see.

Commonly asked questions