SMS segment calculator
Paste a text to see how many SMS segments it takes and why. GSM-7 holds 160 characters, or 153 per part; one character outside it switches the whole text to UCS-2, with 70, or 67 per part. It runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
- Segments
- 1
- Encoding
- UCS-2
- Characters
- 49
- Code units
- 49
- Per segment
- 70
- Left in this segment
- 21
Not in GSM-7, so the text is UCS-2: –
Then it's 1 segment in GSM-7.
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Questions people ask
- How many characters fit in one SMS?
- 160 in GSM-7, the standard SMS alphabet of Latin letters, digits and common symbols. One character outside it, such as an emoji, a curly quote or Amharic, Arabic or Chinese, turns the whole text into UCS-2, which holds 70.
- Why is a long text 153 characters per part, not 160?
- A text longer than one SMS is sent as several parts (concatenated SMS). Each part carries a small header (UDH) so the phone can put them back together, which leaves 153 GSM-7 characters per part, or 67 in UCS-2.
- Why do some characters count as two?
- In GSM-7, the characters ^ { } \ [ ~ ] | and € are sent as an escape plus a character, so each costs 2. In UCS-2, an emoji and other characters beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane take two 16-bit code units, so they cost 2 as well.
- How do I keep a text in GSM-7?
- Swap curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses for their plain versions (the Fix button does this), and leave out emoji. Phones and word processors often type those look-alikes without you noticing.
- Do I pay per segment?
- Carriers and SMS APIs bill each part. With Sparetext the text goes out from your own phone's plan, so it costs what your plan charges, which is nothing on most unlimited plans, and Sparetext counts it as one text however many parts it takes.
Send it from your own phone
Sparetext sends texts from the Android phone or iPhone you already own, by API or from an AI agent, and its send_sms tool reports the encoding and segments before a text goes out.