{"id":757,"date":"2015-12-28T11:51:16","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T09:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.retarus.com\/blog\/en\/the-special-case-of-special-characters-how-to-prevent-losing-half-the-available-sms-characters"},"modified":"2024-05-07T19:03:34","modified_gmt":"2024-05-07T17:03:34","slug":"the-special-case-of-special-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.retarus.com\/blog\/en\/the-special-case-of-special-characters\/","title":{"rendered":"The special case of special characters: How to prevent losing half the available SMS characters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Before the age of Twitter introduced the limiting of messages to 140 characters, people were always talking about another number: 160. Just a little reminder: this is the number of characters that fit into a regular SMS &#8211; providing that it has been coded according to the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/GSM_03.38\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">GSM-7-Bit-alphabet<\/a> which is common in Europe. Ever since SMS flat rates and messenger services have become standard practice for mobile phone users, this limit hardly matters for private use. This is, however, entirely different for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.retarus.com\/industries\/retarus-cloud-messaging-services-for-manufacturing\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">M2M and Industry 4.0<\/a> communication. Here, the established SMS standard is employed whenever IT and production systems send an automated message or notification to a mobile device.<\/p>\n<h3>Foreign languages can reduce the number of characters available<\/h3>\n<p>When these messages are sent internationally, it can very quickly happen that the message is restricted to only 70 characters. This occurs when letters are utilized which are not included in the GSM-7-Bit alphabet (for instance the letters &#8220;\u00eb&#8221; or&nbsp;&#8220;\u00e2&#8221; commonly used in French). In such cases the 16-Bit-Alphabet UCS-2 (Unicode) is required to render the characters correctly, which is automatically accompanied by a drastic reduction of the text length to 70 characters.<\/p>\n<h3>&#8220;Smart Replacement&#8221; automatically replaces special characters<\/h3>\n<p>The solution for this dilemma is called &#8220;Smart Replacement&#8221;. This function ensures that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.retarus.com\/products\/messaging-service-email-fax-sms-edi-for-applications\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Retarus SMS for Applications<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.retarus.com\/products\/managed-sms-services\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Retarus Mail2SMS<\/a> customers can continue to send their messages as 7-Bit-SMS, despite the use of the aforementioned special characters. To avoid the readability of the SMS being impaired by incorrectly displayed characters, Retarus automatically replaces such characters with a similar character (in our example the character \u201c\u00eb\u201d is replaced by a simple \u201ce\u201d). In this way, customers can benefit from using the full 160 characters, without the contents of the text &#8211; in the real sense of the word &#8211; falling by the wayside. As a side effect, \u201cSmart Replacement\u201d thus prevents the unintended doubling of the number of messages sent, helping you to save transmission costs.<\/p>\n<p>Find out more about our SMS services <a href=\"https:\/\/www.retarus.com\/services\/?technology=SMS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a> or directly from your <a href=\"https:\/\/www.retarus.com\/contact\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">local Retarus contact person<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>160 is the number of characters that fit into a regular SMS. The established SMS standard is employed in the autometed transmission of messages in M2M communications and Industry 4.0: When these messages are sent internationally, it can very quickly happen that a message is restricted to only 70 characters due to the usage of special characters. The solution for this dilemma is called &#8220;Smart Replacement&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":758,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[3808,150],"dipi_cpt_category":[],"class_list":["post-757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-product-news","tag-enterprise-sms","tag-smart-replacement"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.0 (Yoast SEO v25.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How to prevent losing half the available SMS characters<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"&quot;Smart Replacement&quot; reliably prevents problems whan transmitting automated SMS messages containing special characters.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.retarus.com\/blog\/en\/the-special-case-of-special-characters\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The special case of special characters: How to prevent losing half the available SMS characters\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&quot;Smart Replacement&quot; reliably prevents problems whan transmitting automated SMS messages containing special characters.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.retarus.com\/blog\/en\/the-special-case-of-special-characters\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Retarus Corporate Blog - 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