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What are SMS segments?
What are SMS segments?
Hannah Chun avatar
Written by Hannah Chun
Updated over a week ago

Answer:

The character limit for a single text message is 160. So if you want to send a text with 170 characters, it will be converted into two segments. This is an SMS segment.

The character length of an SMS is 160 only if it is a standard encoding (Latin alphabet only). If special characters are used in a text message, it will be a Unicode encoding (Latin alphabet + special character), and it will reduce the character limit to 70 per segment.

Given your message of 170 characters (160 Latin characters + 10 special characters), it would be segmented as follows:

  • The first segment would contain the first 70 characters.

  • The second segment would contain the next 70 characters.

  • The third segment would contain the remaining 30 characters.

This segmentation happens because including even one special character necessitates the use of Unicode encoding for the entire message, which reduces the number of characters that can fit in a single SMS segment.

Consequently, a message that is longer than 70 characters will be broken into multiple segments.

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