SMS Message Formatting

Question

Could someone in the know tell me what kind of control I have on the formatting of SMS messages?

For example, bold text or carriage returns etc? Carriage return would be most important to me I suppose, is this possible to do and, if so, how?

Solution

Formatting like bold text or italics, in general no - unless some particular SMS providers use a proprietary format for doing this (I'm not aware of any).

Standard SMSes are encoded using the GSM 03.38 7-bit alphabet which does include CR and LF (and FF) characters, but how these are rendered is up to the receiving end. Out of the two implementations I have to hand, both just ignore CR or LF (but one of them renders a line break if the message includes two consecutive spaces).

Comments

[Stefan]

hmm ok I can live without the bold etc, but a line break would be VERY useful as what we are sending is a sort of receipt with balance before and after purchase... so line breaks would make it much more readable. Let me try and tinker with double spaces and see what that gives me.

[Vicky]

Fair enough, but try it with multiple different devices on the receiving end to make sure you get an overview of what they all do to it.