MMS Character Count
What is the structure of an MMS?
- Subject Line: 40 characters max
- Creative: Image, gif
- Message Copy: 1000 characters max
When sending text and pictures in the same message, a message can contain up to 1 image and 1000 characters.
You can send the maximum subject length of 40 characters.
Please note, some special characters(Unicode charset) count for more than 1 character in a text message, which can affect character count (and therefore, size) in messages
What characters are part of the Unicode charset?
The Unicode character list contains symbols from the Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Hangul alphabets. It also contains several special symbols (such as emoticons, emoji and kanji).
Unicode character list: here
GSM Charset: The GSM 03.38 charset is the standard character set for text messaging on GSM-based cell phones. All GSM handsets and network elements support the GSM 7-bit alphabet. The basic GSM charset contains the letters A to Z (uppercase and lowercase), numbers, special symbols and several symbols from the Greek alphabet.
@ Δ SP 0 ¡ P ¿ p £ _ ! 1 A Q a q $ Φ " 2 B R b r ¥ Γ # 3 C S c s è Λ ¤ 4 D T d t é Ω % 5 E U e u ù Π & 6 F V f v ì Ψ ' 7 G W g w ò Σ ( 8 H X h x Ç Θ ) 9 I Y i y LF Ξ * : J Z j z Ø ESC + ; K Ä k ä ø Æ , < L Ö l ö
Escape Characters: Some characters in the GSM 03.38 extension table can only be used at the cost of two characters. The GSM charset uses 7-bit alphabet encoding, but the escape characters require 14 bits to encode, thus taking up two characters. These symbols are: |, ^, {, }, €, [, ~, ] and \.
Unicode Symbols: Unicode is a standard for encoding, handling and representing the text expressed in many of the world’s writing systems. The latest list of Unicode symbols contains over 120,000 characters from multiple symbol sets and 129 historic and modern scripts.
Unicode Encoding: Compared to the GSM charset, Unicode encoding supports a huge range of languages and symbols. However, if your text message contains a symbol that isn’t in the 7-bit alphabet, UCS-2 encoding must be used. This type of encoding takes up a lot of space, thus reducing the number of characters allowed in a message to 70.