Help Cannot send/receive special characters in SMS

[moshemoshe]

When ever I try to text ANY special characters, the character itself comes up as a ? and a space is placed between each character in the entire text, even when I text other androids or myself. Like, when I text myself

Hablo Espa

 

[benslgdroid]

Are you stock or rooted?

 

[Thorsten]

This is due to longstanding limitation of the U.S. implementation of SMS (Short Message Service; the texting-by-phone protocol), going back to those times when bandwidth was really expensive/limited, even for the big telcos.

The thinking apparently was something along those lines: since U.S. residents can speak or write absolutely no language other than English (riiiiiiiiiiiiight? ), it would save some space if text messages would only use 7 bits per character, just like the ancient ASCII standard. Since absolutely no letters beyond the basic A-Z are covered by ASCII, it is impossible to use it to properly write Spanish, French (Hello, Quebec!) or most other Latin-based languages. (And you can completely forget about Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese etc. etc.)

So there you have it

 

[Britt47]

I've been experiencing this issue since I bought my phone. I'm not sure if additional language packs are needed, so I wish to clarify any information here on this forum.

I am unable to successfully send and receive special characters in my text messages. When I attempt to send a special character (e.g.

 

[Petrah]

5 threads below yours, the answer is there.

http://androidforums.com/lg-optimus-v/556288-cant-text-special-characters.html

 

[moshemoshe]

I'm rooted, benslgdroid, but I feel like, because of what Thorsten said, it doesn't really make a difference....

 

[benslgdroid]

Threads are of the same issue so they have been merged to have all info in one place.

 

[Britt47]

5 threads below yours, the answer is there.

http://androidforums.com/lg-optimus-v/556288-cant-text-special-characters.html

The answer in that topic at the time seemed more of an opinion than an accurate reason. It also spikes many more questions. However, if it's true and there isn't a fix for such a small issue, then there's nothing I can do. English is my native language anyhow so it's no biggie.

Thanks for your help!

 

[benslgdroid]

It's all the same topic now

 

[eirikurr]

This problem is easily fixed. Open the Messages app, go to Settings and select Input Mode - Unicode. Fixed!

 

[Thorsten]

Open the Messages app, go to Settings and select Input Mode - Unicode. Fixed!

What

 

[badblue1]

I am rooted and have a lot of choices under settings, but no input mode?

 

[MacFett]

This isn't an app issue this is because in the united States there are very few special characters used so SMS will not send with special characters. If you are able to send one chances are you have a 3rd party messaging app and it is sending the message via their servers and not your carrier.

 

[jazzman06]

This problem is easily fixed. Open the Messages app, go to Settings and select Input Mode - Unicode. Fixed!

wow!
that fixed my cyrillic in a sec !
all texts sent from Samsung Galaxy S3 mini Android 4.1.2 in Cyrillic
were unreadable on other phones ( iphone, etc) and appeared as ???????
the UNICODE trick fixed it !

thanks

P.S. just for the info , i am in Europe - France on Free mobile network.

 

[tt02002]

cannot fix code why is that?

 

[MacFett]

cannot fix code why is that?

Could you give more info?