Equisys technical notes

Technical guidance, explanations and fixes for our products

INFO: Characters supported with Zetalink WAP and SMS service

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ZTN2010

ID: ZTN2010

This Zetalink technical note applies to:

  • Zetalink version 1.0

Summary

This document is intended to provide information about the text characters supported by the Zetalink WAP and SMS services. It will help users to understand why some of their e-mails, appointments, etc may not appear in the way they expected when viewed through Zetalink.

More information

WAP

WAP does not support extended characters. The Zetalink External Web Site component replaces all such characters with a '?'. This is the default behaviour of some WAP browsers even if Zetalink didn't do this. Users may therefore, for example, see unexpected '?' appearing in place of accented characters or '£' signs.

NOTE: This may cause problems with email addresses that contain accented characters, as the address will now be incorrect.

SMS

Because of the techniques used to compress as much information as possible into messages, SMS uses a limited character set. The DEVSMS program within the communications server (Zetafax) will convert the text it is given so that only supported characters are used. Most accented characters are converted to the nearest unaccented equivalents. Where such a conversion is not possible the characters will be replaced with a '?'.

Last updated: 15 November 2001 (GS/DH)

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