What is the difference between 7 bit and ucs2

Text editors designed for writing might automatically add angled smart quotes, non-standard spaces, or punctuation which looks similar to GSM-7 but is a different Unicode character.

We've discussed a few of these issues on our blog. In some languages, more than symbols are commonly used, so a larger universe of potential characters is needed. UCS-2 has been implemented in many GSM networks and on many mobile devices, and is considered the defacto standard fallback. By the Unicode standard, UCS-2 is an obsolete encoding because it wasn't designed to allow characters in the so-called supplementary or 'astral' planes in Unicode. Plane 0, the Basic Multilingual Plane, contains character encodings for what are believed to be the most commonly used characters in modern languages.

Sign up for a free Twilio trial account today - you'll have enough credit to explore the two major encodings we use, and a lot more. We are always striving to improve our documentation quality, and your feedback is valuable to us. How could this documentation serve you better? Twilio Docs. Ready to start building? It is used as a fallback on many GSM networks when a message cannot be encoded using GSM-7 or when a language requires more than characters to be rendered.

Character is an overloaded term, so it is actually more correct to refer to code points. Code points allow abstraction from the character term, and are the atomic unit of storage of information in an encoding. UCS-2 is a fixed-width encoding; each encoded code point will take exactly 2 bytes. Plane 0, the Basic Multilingual Plane, contains character encodings for what are believed to be the most commonly used characters in modern languages.

This makes it possible, for example, to use the standard 7-bit GMS alphabet as the default but to send specific SMS messages using a different character set. For example, although the DefaultDataCoding parameter may be set to 0 for a plug-in instance, the following SOAP header sets the data coding scheme for its SMS message to 8 , stipulating that the UCS2 character set should be used for encoding the SMS message in this particular request:.

Skip Headers. Other Alphabets It is possible to send characters that are not in the standard or extended GSM alphabets if the DefaultDataCoding attribute is configured appropriately. All rights reserved. Book List. Contact Us.