Understanding SMS lengths and 'units'

Modified on Fri, 20 Aug 2021 at 01:56 PM

For the most in depth information, please look here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38

It is important to keep in mind that the 'basic' set of characters is limited. There are some special characters in the 'Basic Extended Set' that count as two characters in a non-unicode message: ^\[~]|€{}

Anything outside of the basic and extended set forces the message to be sent as unicode.

Using the 7bit encoding character set:

- single message unit can be a maximum of 160 characters.

- If you exceed the 160 characters, all 'message units' are calculated in multiples of 153 characters, with the other 7 characters used for concatenation headers. (e.g. 2 sms units is a message of 306 max length)

If there are any characters outside of the 7bit encoding set used, the message is classed as 'unicode'

- A single unicode message is 70 characters.

- If you exceed 70 characters, then multiples of 67 characters to calculate the units due to the headers.

- Most emoji's are 2 unicode characters (there's a small set that are a single character)

- Some emoji's are actually combinations of symbols that devices then display as a single symbol.

- e.g. A 'coloured thumbs up' emoji is both a colour symbol followed by the thumbs up symbol. This results in the use of 4 unicode character being required for what appears to be a single emoji.

- e.g. The 'family' emojis are actually a combination of 4 different symbols (man, woman, child, child) and takes 8 characters.

Note: If you are checking a message length using our message builder UI we have an 'on paste' filter that will change a couple of known problem characters. (Apostrophes, single and double quotes and ellipses when pasted from Microsoft Word use unicode characters)

Note: To help users of our API's, we have a set of character replacements which attempt to keep a message as non-unicode. These are similar to our 'on paste' filtering but also includes some things like: 0-width space, unicode space, tab character, hyphens and bullet point characters.