Special characters like emojis can have an impact on the length of SMS messages. In standard text messaging, each character typically occupies one character space. However, emojis, along with certain special characters, symbols, or non-Latin characters, often require more than one character space. This is because these characters are encoded in Unicode, which uses a variable number of bytes to represent different characters.
When you include emojis or other special characters in your SMS message, it's important to keep in mind that they may consume more character space than you expect. For example, a single emoji can take up anywhere from 2 to 4 character spaces, depending on the specific character and the encoding used by the messaging system.
The length of an SMS message is generally limited to 160 characters per message in the standard GSM 7-bit encoding. However, when special characters or emojis are included, the encoding may switch to UCS-2, which reduces the maximum character limit to 70 characters per message.