title: Special characters in Android sms
body: <p>I've observed this issue for years now, not knowing where it came from. I am concerned that this bug is still observable in the new versions of Android, in 2011, and I hope you can finally help me to fully understand it, if not solve it.</p>
  
  <p>Let's consider the given (real) situation. Mister "A" is using a custom SMS/MMS app from Sony on his Xperia Arc (official 2.3.3). Mister B is using the android SMS/MMS stack app on his Milestone (Cyanogen 6.12, unofficial 2.2). Both of them use Android in French (if that matters).</p>
  
  <p>When A sends a sms to B containing special characters like "ç", "ê", B receives a message with  these characters replaced by a space. Characters like "é" are working fine though.
  When B sends the sms to A, everything works fine.
  When A sends this sms to himself, everything works fine.</p>
  
  <p>Conclusion : this is not the mobile provider's fault since it works in one way and not the other. </p>
  
  <p>So, I guessed at first that something was wrong with A's custom app. Replaced it with the apk from B's phone. Everything remained the same. I decompiled the app and I didn't find where the encoding of the sms string was done. I concluded the bug is not coming from the app, but from the way Android encodes the strings... </p>
  
  <p>I ran another test : 
  I wrote an sms with only standard characters, something like 250 characters in 1.5 sms. Then, I append a "ç" to the sms. 
  On A's phone : the counter says it consumed 10 characters. 
  On B's phone : the counter says the sms now takes 3 sms : the string size doubled !</p>
  
  <p>Conclusion : 
  On A's phone, the default charset includes "ç".
  On B's phone, when "ç" appears, the charset changes and each character needs then twice the original space. 
  (Or am I missing something ?)</p>
  
  <p>Questions :
  Why different version of Android aren't using the same default charset ?
  On Android, are these default charset depending on the rom, for example ? 
  Can we configure/change these charset somewhere (in the menu or directly on a rooted phone) ?
  Is there another easy way to fix this ?</p>
  
  <p>Any help, explanation or experience is welcome :)</p>