SMS letters, symbols, and how they affect your messaging

So we know that not all text characters are created equal. But what does that mean?

Let us explain 🤓

There's a lot of different terms in the SMS language, so let's break those down for you first. 

• Characters 
  Each symbol, letter, and number in a text is called a character and has a specific count associated with it. For most characters, the count will be one.
  
  
• GSM7 Alphabet 
  GSM7 is just the standard alphabet used for SMS messages.
  
  
• GSM7 Characters
  Basic letters, numbers, and symbols in a text message. Spaces are also considered a character. 
  • Example:
    
     
  
  Each character in this message is one character so there are 61 characters total. 
  (Remember spaces count!)
  
  
• GSM7 Extensive Characters  
  These characters require an "escape character" within the text which means these characters count as two characters in a message.
  The following characters are considered GSM7 Extension characters:
   |    ^    {    }    [    ]    ~    \   €  
  
  
• Emojis or Unicode. Standard emojis count as two characters when writing a message. Including an emoji will make all GSM7 Extension Characters count as one character, not two.
  • Example: 
  
  
  Each character, including both "|" characters, would count as one character while the emoji would count as two characters for a total of 67 characters. 

Do I need to remember all this when writing a text? 🤔

Of course not! 

Simply plug your copy into our Message Segment Calculator and it'll tell you the number of characters as well as segments in your message. ➕➖