SMS text message encoding

IoT Modules General wireless topics
1

My company forecast2phone.com sends a weather forecast as an SMS / text message. Part of the forecast is the percentage chance of rain which includes the percent symbol % one customer has mentioned that the percent sign shows on his phone as an upside down question mark and a triangle symbol. Do I need to include some type of encoding when I send the message from my computer with a sendmail.php script?

2

Hi,
You said only one customer is facing this issue? maybe his phone is using different coding?

Anyway, not sure which modules nor method you are sending the SMS.
Maybe you can refer to this FAQ for more info:
[url]https://forum.sierrawireless.com/t/hilo-how-to-send-and-receive-sms-with-special-character/6508/1]

Hope it helps.

3

Thanks, the link is helpful. Do I need to do anything special to encode normal text messages? Is the percent sign a special character? Are messages sent to 3G and 4G phones sent the same way?

4

Hi,

I think “%” is universal in most encoding…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_sign#Encodings

And yes, it should be universal in both 3G and 4G phone, but again, maybe that phone facing the issue is using special coding method?

Thx

5

Thanks for all your help. I tested the text message with other 4g phones and the percent sign comes through just fine. I don’t think I will change anything unless others complain. I will reply back if I get more information about that phone or if I can test sending the percent sign with encoding to that specific phone. My understanding is that I don’t need to specify the encoding, I don’t specify the encoding now and it seems to work fine except for that one phone. Is that generally correct? Or is the standard practice to specify enocding?