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title: "Smart Character Replacement"
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Smart Character Replacement: Transliterating Unicode to GSM-7 to Slash SMS Bills: SMSRiver

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Character Encoding & Economics

Character Encoding & Economics

Published 2026-08-29

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7 min read

#
Smart Character Replacement: Transliterating Unicode to GSM-7 to Slash SMS Bills

Algorithmic guide to smart character transliteration for SMS. Automatically map Unicode quotes, accents, and symbols to GSM-7 equivalents before dispatch.

Key Takeaway & Executive Summary

Deploy pre-send transliteration middleware to map Unicode characters (curly quotes, dashes, accents) to GSM-7 equivalents, keeping messages in 1 segment.

Accidental Unicode characters often slip into notification templates through user input, copy-pasting from text editors, or dynamic user names. Deploying smart character transliteration middleware ensures that non-essential Unicode characters are mapped to standard GSM-7 equivalents automatically.

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Table of Contents

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[
Standard Transliteration Mapping Table
](#section-1)

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[
Frequently Asked Questions
](#frequently-asked-questions)

##

1

Standard Transliteration Mapping Table

- Left/Right Double Quotes (“ ”) -> Standard Quote (")
- Left/Right Single Quotes (‘ ’) -> Standard Apostrophe (')
- En-dash / Em-dash (– —) -> Standard Hyphen (-)
- Ellipsis (…) -> Three periods (...)
- Accented Characters (á, í, ó, ú) -> Plain Latin (a, i, o, u)

##

Frequently Asked Questions • Character Encoding & Economics

Does transliteration alter message meaning?

For notification copy, transactional passcodes, and links, transliterating typographic punctuation preserves full semantic meaning while preventing segment inflation.

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