SMS Character Counter
How many message parts your text needs, and which characters force Unicode.
Your text never leaves this device
Counting for a specific limit
How SMS length works
- GSM-7
- The default SMS alphabet (3GPP TS 23.038) has 128 slots: basic Latin letters, digits, common punctuation and a handful of accented letters and Greek capitals. One message holds 160 slots.
- Two-slot characters
- ^ { } [ ] \ ~ | and € are sent as an escape code plus a character, so each one uses 2 slots.
- Split messages
- A longer text is sent as parts that the phone joins back together. Each part carries a short header (3GPP TS 23.040), which leaves 153 slots per part.
- Unicode
- If even one character is outside GSM-7, the whole text is sent as UCS-2: 70 units in a single message and 67 per part. Most emoji use 2 units.
- Not covered
- National language shift tables (Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese) that some networks support, and how your carrier or messaging provider bills the parts.
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Questions
Why did my 161-character text become two messages?
A single GSM-7 message holds 160 characters. One more and the text is split into parts of 153, because each part needs room for the header that lets the phone rejoin them. 161 characters become 153 + 8.
Which characters switch a text to Unicode?
Anything outside the GSM-7 alphabet: emoji, curly quotes (’ “ ”), the long dash (—), the ellipsis character (…) and letters such as ç, á or ê. The letters é, è, à, ñ, ü and ö are in the alphabet and are fine. The tool lists the characters it found in your text.
How long can a text with an emoji be?
70 UTF-16 units in one message, and most emoji use 2 of them. A text of 69 letters plus one emoji is 71 units, so it is sent as two parts.
Keep reading
- How X counts characters: emoji, links and the 280 limitX counts a weighted length, not characters: Latin letters count 1, Korean, Chinese and Japanese characters 2, every link 23 and each emoji 2. A table of examples counted with our tool and checked against twitter-text.
- Why a 161-character text costs two messagesOne SMS holds 160 GSM-7 characters, but split messages hold only 153 each, and a single emoji or curly quote drops the limit to 70. Tables of where the breaks fall, counted with our SMS tool.
- Characters, code points, bytes: why 👨👩👧 is 1, 5 or 18One emoji can be 1 character, 5 code points, 8 UTF-16 units or 18 bytes. What each number measures, a table of common cases counted four ways, and which one a length limit is likely to use.
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