Message formatter
SMS formatter
Write each language's message, keep its smart characters from changing the encoding, and count its segments.
Reading the text kept in this tab.
140 octets, three encodings
An SMS user-data field is 140 octets. GSM-7 packs 160 septets into one segment and 153 into each part of a concatenated message, because the usual 8-bit reference header takes 6 octets. Latin-1 is sent as 8-bit data: 140 characters, then 134. UCS-2 holds 70 characters, then 67.
One curly quote, the whole message
A single character outside the GSM alphabet switches the entire message to a wider encoding. Curly quotes, dashes, ellipses, and special spaces from a phone or a Mac are replaced before counting, so they no longer do. Real letters are not transliterated. The extension table, including €, costs two septets and stays in GSM-7.