Sending Unicode SMS via Kannel

Sending Unicode SMS via Kannel

Filed under: GSM — Tags: chinese sms, gsm characters, kannel, unicode sms — tiliman @ 3:36 pm

Kannel is always a delight to work with. It is solid piece of software that would win over any commercial SMS GW.

Standard GSM characters are usually enough for English and most European languages but when it comes to sending SMS in other languages you have to rely on UNICODE. Here is character sheet of GSM characterset http://www.csoft.co.uk/sms/character_sets/gsm.htm
It might seem tricky at first to send Unicode SMS via Kannel and usually requires trial and error.

Sending unicode SMS involves following
1– Converting your SMS body string from whatever character set to into UNICODE (UTF-16).
2– URL Encoding (Percent Encoding) the SMS body.

HTTP GET example for sending Unicode SMS

My text here is stored in UTF-8 so I have to first convert it to UNICODE and then convert to URLencoded format.
The result comes out to be something like this
%60O%7DY%0Bg%CBSMichael
Now in Kannel send URL I have to specify that I am sending it UNICODE and for that I used charset=UCS-2
and to tell Kannel to send SMS as UNICODE as well (not as GSM characters) coding=2
I use HTTP GET URL for testing and this is how my final URL looks like
lynx –dump “http://KANNEL_SERVER:13003/cgi-bin/sendsms?username=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD&from=YOURFROMID&to=MOBILE_NUMBER&text=%60O%7DY%0Bg%CBSMichael&coding=2&charset=UCS-2″

Fuente:http://tiliman.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/sending-unicode-sms-via-kannel/

Saludos

Adalberto Montanía