Overview

Message encoding is how your text message is sent to the mobile phone carriers. The type of encoding used influences how many characters can be used in each message segment.

When you send a text message, Sakari automatically looks at each character in your message to identify its encoding type and the overall message length. The number of segments is determined based on the encoding type and character count.

The two types of SMS encoding used by Sakari are GSM-7 encoding and UCS-2 (Unicode) encoding.

GSM-7 encoding

GSM-7 is the most commonly used encoding type and supports more than 128 common letters and symbols. Each segment is limited to 160 characters.

When you send SMS messages with Sakari, we automatically use the most compact encoding possible. If you only use GSM-7 characters, your messages will be encoded at GSM-7.

UCS-2 (Unicode) encoding

If one or more non-GSM-7 characters are included, the whole message will be encoded at UCS-2. UCS-2 (Unicode) uses 16 bits to encode each character, which limits each message segment to 70 characters, effectively doubling the segment count of the message.

Common Unicode characters

These commonly used characters will change your message encoding type from GSM-7 to Unicode, lowering your segment character count from 160 to 70 characters per segment.

Emojis (Partial List)

😀 😁 😂 🤣 😃 😄 😅 😆 😉 😊 😋 😎 😍 😘 🥰 😗 😙 😚 ☺️ 🙂 🤗 🤩 🤔 🤨 😐 😑 😶 🙄 😏 😣 😥 😮 🤐 😯 😪 😫 😴 😌 😛 😜 😝 🤤 😒 😓 😔 😕 🙃 🤑 😲 ☹️ 🙁 😖 😞 😟 😤 😢 😭 😦 😧 😨 😩 🤯 😬 😰 😱 🥵 🥶 😳 🤪 😵 😡 😠 🤬 😷 🤒 🤕 🤢 🤮 🤧 😇 🤠 🤡 🥳 🥴 🥺 🤥 🤫 🤭 🧐 🤓 😈 👿 👹 👺 💀 👻 👽 🤖 💩 😺 😸 😹 😻 😼 😽 🙀 😿 😾

Non-Emoji Unicode Characters (Partial List)

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