Question 1

How many characters fit in one SMS?

Accepted Answer

A standard SMS using the GSM-7 character set fits 160 characters in one segment. If your message contains any character outside the GSM-7 set (such as emoji or Chinese), it switches to UCS-2 encoding, which fits only 70 characters per segment.

Question 2

What happens when my message exceeds one segment?

Accepted Answer

Long messages are split into multiple segments. For GSM-7, each segment holds 153 characters (7 are used for the concatenation header). For UCS-2, each segment holds 67 characters. The tool shows exactly how many segments your message needs.

Question 3

What is the GSM-7 character set?

Accepted Answer

GSM-7 is the standard alphabet for SMS messages. It includes basic Latin letters, digits, common punctuation and a few symbols. Some characters like { } [ ] \ and | count as two characters each in GSM-7.

Question 4

Does this tool send any messages?

Accepted Answer

No. This is a pure character-counting and segment-calculating tool. All processing happens in your browser. Nothing is sent, stored or transmitted.