Comments on: The GSM character set

By: John

John — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:09:57 +0000

To send to our API you would use UTF-8. So the bytes for this are E2,82,AC.

The GSM codes are the codes used to transfer the message to the phone.

65 on it's own is the letter 'e'. To send a €, the networks use an escape character of 1B followed by the letter 'e' (1B, 65). This is why the € symbol takes the space of two GSM characters in a message.

Whilst it isn't necessary to know the exact GSM codes to send into our API, the information in the blog article lets you know which characters can be sent to a phone in a standard 160 GSM SMS, and which take 2 characters spaces.

By: ssam

ssam — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:59:32 +0000

to send € – do we send 1B65 is it how its relayed to the carriers and how is it displayed on the phone?

part I am not clear is – if 65 maps to € then why are we escaping it??

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:21:00 +0000

Mark, The 03.38 refereed to on some sites is a specification number assigned by 3GPP who are the body that oversee international mobile standards. In this case it's the 38th document of their Technical realization series. The current version of the specification is 7.2.0, released in 1999. The earliest version still available on their site is 4.0.1, released in 1994, the major change in the character set between these versions is the addition of the extended GSM characters {}[]^|â‚¬~\.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:37:33 +0000

Very interesting. I’ve noticed that some refer to it as the gsm 03.38 character set. Were there earlier versions, and how long has gsm 03.38 been the standard?