Data Coding Scheme

In SMPP, the data coding scheme (DCS) indicates information that includes (but isn't restricted to) the character set that the message text is in.

Default character set

When your account is first provisioned, we set a default character encoding on your account for both sending and receiving messages. When sending messages, use DCS 0 to indicate that the message text uses your default character encoding. You can choose either of these two character sets as the default for your account:

  • Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1).
    A table of characters is below.
  • GSM 7-bit default alphabet and extension table of 3GPP TS 23.038 / GSM 03.38.
    A table of characters is below.

During the provisioning process with OpenMarket, make sure to inform us as to whether you want to have GSM or Latin-1 as your default character set; otherwise, Latin-1 is set as your default.

Important: If at a later date you want to change the default character set, contact OpenMarket Support or your account manager. Changing the encoding you are using for DCS 0 without coordinating with OpenMarket might result in your message text becoming corrupted.

Other DCS options

Other DCS options include:

  • DCS 4 — Binary message
  • DCS 8 — UTF-16 big-endian encoding. See the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16.
  • DCS 240 — Flash (class 0) message. The message text must use the default character set configured for your account.
  • DCS 24 — Flash (class 0) message, where the message text uses UCS-2.
  • DCS 246 — SIM-specific binary message. This is only used in special cases where you are communicating with a custom application on the mobile device. No message reaches the phone's SMS inbox.

Latin-1 characters

The characters not present in the GSM character set are shown on a grey background.

The acronyms in the table are:

  • LF — line feed
  • FF — form feed
  • CR — carriage return
  • SP — space
  • NBSP — non-breaking space
  • SHY — soft hyphen

See the Wikipedia article for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin-1.

Modified Latin-9 character set

GSM 03.38 characters

See the Wikipedia article for more information:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38 .

GSM 03.38 character set

GSM 03.38 escaped characters