What is Unicode Standard?
Unicode standard is a type of character encoding system designed for consistency in the computing industry. The Unicode system is able to handle a large set of letters and symbols that are not contained within the standard GSM alphabet. The GSM alphabet includes all Latin characters, digits and a few special symbols. Languages such as Chinese and Thai, technical symbols and picture characters or emojis are classified as Unicode characters.
What is a Unicode Message?
A Unicode message is a message that is encoded using the Unicode standard. Any message that contains even a single Unicode character must be encoded in this way in order to properly display the Unicode characters.
How many characters can a Unicode message contain?
A Unicode message can contain 70 characters per SMS before it is split into multiple parts.
If more than 70 characters are used and the message is split up into multiple parts, only 67 characters can be used per SMS part as three characters worth of data is necessary to join the messages together in the correct order.
What does a Unicode character look like?
Unicode Symbol | Name |
‘ ’ | Apostrophe |
“ ” | Double quotation marks |
` | Grave accent |
- | Hyphen/dash |
& | Ampersand |
ß | Eszett (German) |
¶ | Pilcrow (English document formating and footnotes) |
© | Copyright |
Ω | Omega (Greek) |
÷ | Division |
∞ | Infinity |
Ñ | Tilde (Latin, Spanish) |
' | Curly Apostrophe (Can be replaced with ') |
Notes relating to Unicode characters
Unicode support is carrier limited.
If you are sending messages using our HTTP API, Unicode messages need to be triple encoded in order to be interpreted correctly.
When sending a message in MXT or via integration (APIs), avoid copying and pasting your message from MS Word, or other similar programs. Instead, type the message directly into MXT or your software to avoid accidentally adding Unicode Characters.
Sending Unicode characters via SMPP, you must ensure to set your DCS value to 8 to ensure Unicode it encrypted correctly.