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NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ NowSMS Support - SMS Issues ⬆ Archive through April 12, 2010 ⬆ |
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| Author | Message | |||
| Constantinos Psilogenis New member Username: Constgp Post Number: 1 Registered: 03-2010 |
Hi I'm trying to send an sms with Greek characters over smpp by calling the url(with script). Unfortunately nowsms converts it to DCS 8 and the Greek characters are not shown. if I use the web driven menu of nowsms I can send Greek. Another test I did if my SMSC is a GSM modem I can put as a url parameter the charset=ISO-8859-7 and send Greek with no problem the problem is only when my SMSC is the smpp connnection. Can anybody help me please? | |||
| Des - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Desosms Post Number: 1905 Registered: 08-2008 |
Hi Constantinos, If the characters are going out correct via GSM modem, then this is a good sign that NowSMS is recognising the characters properly. (By default, NowSMS expects UTF-8 character encoding, but as you mention, you can use "&charset=iso-8859-7" to explicitly specify a character set.) It sounds like a character set issue with the SMPP SMSC connection. By default, NowSMS uses the GSM character set for SMPP ... which does include some Greek characters (and there are a few Greek characters that we remap to English equivalents for SMS). However, the alternative character set for SMPP is iso-8859-1, and that character set does not include your Greek characters! Try going into the "Advanced Settings" under properties of the SMPP connection in NowSMS, and set the character set to GSM/IA5. This is the character set that NowSMS defaults to ... however, by default NowSMS sets the character set flag to "default". It is possible that your SMSC is using iso-8859-1 as its default. So this setting will explicitly tell the SMSC that you are using GSM/IA5. Hopefully that will work. If it doesn't, and your SMPP provider only supports iso-8859-1 (and Unicode), then this will be a problem. You don't want to resort to Unicode for sending Greek characters (limits message to 70 characters instead of 160). -- Des NowSMS Support | |||
| Constantinos Psilogenis New member Username: Constgp Post Number: 2 Registered: 03-2010 |
Hi Des, Thank you for your response. I did the change you suggested and I can send some greek characters but not all of them. I talked with my smpp service provider and he told that from the smpp trace he has, can see that I send: Data coding: 0x03 which MUST BECOME 0x00 SMPP Data Coding Scheme: Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1) (0x03)which must be GSM DEFAULT ALPHABET. I can translate my self the greek characters to the corresponding hex code but at the time is not working. Do you have any idea how can we handle this.}} | |||
| Des - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Desosms Post Number: 1910 Registered: 08-2008 |
Hi Constantinos, The information that you have seems contradictory, or maybe I didn't do a good job explaining. Let me try to clarify:
This is controlled by the "SMSC character set" property. The "default" setting is a value of 0, and uses the GSM alphabet, which includes Greek characters. "Latin/iso-8859-1" uses a value of 3, and uses a Western European character set which does not include Greek characters. "GSM/IA5" uses a value of 1, and uses the GSM alphabet, which includes some Greek characters.
The "SMSC Character Set" "default" setting is to use the GSM alphabet with a data coding value of 0. That is what you should have been using initially when you were having problems. My earlier suggestion was to set the "SMSC Character Set" to GSM/IA5. This sets the data coding value to 1, to explicitly tell the SMSC that you are using the GSM alphabet. Did you try this? Specifically which Greek characters are you talking about? -- Des NowSMS Support | |||
| Constantinos Psilogenis New member Username: Constgp Post Number: 3 Registered: 03-2010 |
Hi Des, About the Data coding this request was given to me by my service provider. What I had, before following your suggestion was the conversion automatically from nowsms to dcs 8. This was logged in SMSDebug.log. This Data coding equals to 0x03 was after following your suggestion. The only think I'm setting in my command is the charset-iso-8859-7 also before and after changing "SMSC Character Set". So what you are saying is that I shouldn't have at any time, based on my settings these data codings. I have no idea how these 3 or 8 values are coming from. Mainly I have problem with the Greek character Γ (GAMMAA hex code 0x13), but in some phones like blackberry doesn't show any greek character displays only the characters which are common with the latin ones. | |||
| Des - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Desosms Post Number: 1913 Registered: 08-2008 |
Hi Constantinos, I'm sorry, I completely missed the part in your first message where you mentioned DCS=8. If you are ever seeing DCS=8, this means that you are using characters that are outside of the GSM character set. It sounds like you already have a copy of this table, as indeed Gamma (Γ) is 0x13. Here is a link that shows the table: http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/1103.html NowSMS automatically uses Unicode encoding (DCS=8) if your message contains any characters that are outside of the GSM character set. There are some Greek characters that look identical to the Latin characters (ΑΒΕΖΗΙΚΜΝΟΡΤΥΧ), so if they are in a message, we automatically use the Latin equivalents in order to avoid having to use Unicode. Can you try some tests using the NowSMS web interface to try to determine what character is causing problems? The web interface will tell you when you are using a character that requires Unicode encoding (the text changes from "x characters" to "x unicode characters"). -- Des NowSMS Support | |||
| Constantinos Psilogenis New member Username: Constgp Post Number: 4 Registered: 03-2010 |
Hi Des, I return back to "Default" Character set for the SMSC and putting the in the http call the charset=iso-8859-7 I have what I want. My provider receive the dcs=0 so the message is delivered correctly. Thank you for your help | |||
