As with the body of the message you send the ‘from’ address (originator) to our API using UTF-8.

In theory the originator should support any of the characters in the GSM character set, but our usual advice is just to use letters or numbers in the originator, spaces and symbols have sometimes been known to cause issues.

So for your example above, use ‘AaaBbb’ as the originator.

Bear in mind that if you want to use these type of originators, rather than actual numbers, that you can only use 11 characters. Also the end user cannot reply to the message.

John

Does this apply to the variable “from” which allows to change the sender’s name to be shown?

I’m trying to change it to something like “aaa bbb” (note the space) with no success.

Thanks,

Pablo

You can send UCS-2 message through our API, by using the MsgType parameter.

You set the Content parameter as you would when sending a normal text message, using UTF-8.

Set MsgType to UCS2 (MsgType=UCS2 for HTTP interface, <MsgType>UCS2</MsgType> for XML interface)

Example:
http://sms.message-platform.com/http/send.aspx?Username=username&Password=Password&Content=Hello+world+%C3%A0+%C3%A1&MsgType=UCS2&To=447710123456&From=originator

You say.. If you need to send other characters than those in the GSM character set, then take a look at UCS-2 messaging which allows sending most unicode characters, but as each of these takes 2 bytes it means only 70 characters can be sent per SMS.

Can you explain a little more as to how this can be done?
Thanks

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.

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

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 {}[]^|€~\.