This article is about Unicode: Characters that may increase your fragment usage and subsequently SMS fragment costs - if you want to find out more about fragments and what these are, take a look at this article first.
What is Unicode? 🔡
Unicode allows all the characters used in every language to be encoded under one consistent character set.
It also enables other characters to be encoded which allows the sending of emojis in text messages, or scripts and alphabets that don’t exist in the standard character set (i.e an Arabic script character).
This means that Unicode handles any known character but also takes up more SMS space than the typical character. So, to compare the 2:
Unicode SMS messages are limited to 70 characters per fragment because they take up more room, and messages longer than this will be segmented into a separate fragment.
Plain text SMS messages (or non-unicode messages) which take up less space can contain up to 160 characters per fragment so you’re less likely to use as many fragments.
What do I need to know about Unicode? 🤔
If you’re sending a text message that contains a Unicode character, it will increase your character count, and as a result, could increase your fragment use unknowingly.
How do I send an SMS using Unicode?
You don’t need to do anything to send an SMS using Unicode; if a text is sent using the standard GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) character set, then 160 characters is the maximum text length for 1 fragment.
It will automatically identify if a message contains Unicode characters, and then the number of available characters per fragment is reduced to just 70 - this is because Unicode characters contain more SMS space in the code.
If you’re planning to use emojis or other non-standard characters you’ll need to be aware that your text will probably use more than one text fragment so could cost double what you were expecting.
Common Unicode Characters 💡
There are some familiar characters you should be aware of and instead, consider using their more efficient GSM counterparts if appropriate 👇
GSM | Unicode |
a | а ạ ą ä à á ą |
c | с ƈ ċ |
d | ԁ ɗ |
e | е ẹ ė é è |
g | ġ |
h | һ |
i | і í ï |
j | ј ʝ |
k | κ |
l | ӏ ḷ |
n | ո |
o | о ο օ ȯ ọ ỏ ơ ó ò ö |
p | р |
q | զ |
s | ʂ |
u | υ ս ü ú ù |
v | ν ѵ |
x | х ҳ |
y | у ý |
z | ʐ ż |
Note that all emojis and characters not in the latin script will be in Unicode.
If you still have any questions or concerns, feel free to chat with us using the green message bubble in the bottom right-hand corner of this page. 👉