Standard SMS Text Messages are limited to 140 bytes. You can encode
160 7 bit characters in 140 bytes. Trouble is, even if you are only
using simple ASCII characters you're not guaranteed it will fit.
That's because SMS is encoded in GSM 03.38, not ASCII.
Some characters require two characters to encode. For example
^, €, ~, [, ] and some others. Send a message consisting only
of '~'s and you'll find you're limited to 80 characters.
Send a message that you've carefully limited to 160 characters,
but include a single '~' and you now need two messages to send it!
Throw in Unicode, for languages such as Hindi, Chinese, Russian etc,
and you're restricted to just 70 characters per standard SMS.
70, not 80 as 16 bytes are needed for encoding each character.
So, How Long is an SMS Text Message?
For messages going through our system it works out as follows:
GSM encoding:
- 1 standard SMS message = up to 160 characters
- 2 concatenated SMS messages = up to 306 characters
- 3 concatenated SMS messages = up to 459 characters
- 4 concatenated SMS messages = up to 612 characters
- 5 concatenated SMS messages = up to 765 characters
UCS-2 encoding:
- 1 standard SMS message = up to 70 characters
- 2 concatenated SMS messages = up to 134 characters
- 3 concatenated SMS messages = up to 201 characters
- 4 concatenated SMS messages = up to 268 characters
- 5 concatenated SMS messages = up to 335 characters
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