SMS character replacements

When you paste text from Word, a web page, or a design tool, it often carries "fancy" versions of everyday characters — curly quotes, en dashes, fullwidth letters, decorative asterisks, and invisible spacing characters. To keep your messages rendering reliably across all handsets and to avoid unexpectedly pushing a message into a more expensive character encoding, Mobiz automatically converts these to their standard equivalents before sending.

You don't need to do anything for this to happen — it's automatic. This article is simply a reference for what gets replaced with what.

In this article:

1. Quotation marks and apostrophes
2. Dashes and hyphens
3. Slashes and fractions
4. Brackets and parentheses
5. Punctuation
6. Symbols and operators
7. Letters and digits
8. Spaces and invisible characters

Quotation marks and apostrophes

All decorative, angled, and fullwidth quotation marks are converted to plain straight quotes.

Converted to a straight double quote ("): left and right double quotation marks (" "), double low and high-reversed quotation marks („ ‟), left- and right-pointing double angle quotes (« »), double prime and double-apostrophe modifier letters (ʺ ˮ), the heavy comma ornaments (❝ ❞), the reversed and double prime quotation marks (〝 〞), and the fullwidth quotation mark.

Converted to a straight single quote or apostrophe ('): left and right single quotation marks (' '), the single high-reversed and single low quotation marks (‛ ‚), acute and grave accents (´ `) and their modifier-letter forms (ˊ ˋ), the prime, turned-comma, reversed-comma, apostrophe, and vertical-line modifier letters (ʹ ʻ ʽ ʼ ˈ), the heavy single comma ornaments (❛ ❜), the fullwidth apostrophe, and several combining and vertical-form comma marks.

Dashes and hyphens

Every dash-like character is converted to a plain hyphen (-). This includes the em dash (—), en dash (–), horizontal bar (―), the true hyphen (‐), the small and fullwidth hyphen-minus, the box-drawing scan lines, and — worth noting — the bullet (•) and hyphen bullet (⁃).

Slashes and fractions

Converted to a forward slash (/): the division sign (÷), fraction slash (⁄), division slash (∕), big solidus (⧸), fullwidth solidus, and the combining solidus overlays.

Converted to a backslash (\): the reverse solidus operator (⧵), big reverse solidus (⧹), small and fullwidth reverse solidus, and the combining reverse solidus overlay.

Fractions are spelled out: ¼ becomes 1/4, ½ becomes 1/2, and ¾ becomes 3/4.

Brackets and parentheses

Ornamental, flattened, small, fullwidth, and white (outlined) bracket forms are all converted to their standard ASCII versions:

• Parentheses (( and )) — the medium, flattened, small, fullwidth, mathematical flattened, and white parenthesis forms
• Curly brackets ({ and }) — the ornament, small, and fullwidth forms
• Square brackets ([ and ]) — the fullwidth forms

Punctuation

Small, fullwidth, ideographic, and presentation-form punctuation is converted to the standard character:

• Period (.) — small, fullwidth, ideographic, and halfwidth ideographic full stops
• Comma (,) — small, fullwidth, ideographic, halfwidth, and combining-below comma forms, plus the single low quotation mark
• Colon (:) and semicolon (;) — the modifier-letter, small, fullwidth, and presentation forms
• Exclamation mark (!) — the retroflex click (ǃ), small, fullwidth, and presentation forms
• Question mark (?) — small, fullwidth, and presentation forms
• The double exclamation mark (‼) becomes !!
• The horizontal ellipsis (…) becomes three dots (...)

Symbols and operators

Small and fullwidth symbol forms — and a large collection of decorative asterisks — are normalised to their standard equivalents: @, #, $, %, &, +, ^, ~, _, |, <, >, =, and *.

The asterisk group is the largest: every star, teardrop-spoked, balloon-spoked, and open-centre ornament, along with the asterisk operator and small and fullwidth forms, is converted to a plain *.

Letters and digits

Some fonts and tools substitute stylised letterforms that look normal but aren't standard characters. These are converted back to plain ASCII:

• Fullwidth letters (Ａ–Ｚ) and small-capital letters (ᴀ, ʙ, ᴄ, ...) are converted to their normal uppercase letters (A–Z).
• Fullwidth digits (０–９) are converted to normal digits (0–9).

Spaces and invisible characters

A wide range of Unicode whitespace — non-break space, en/em spaces, thin and hair spaces, the zero-width space, ideographic space, and similar — is normalised, along with invisible control characters such as null, tab, escape, and the device-control codes. These are removed or replaced with a standard space so they don't create hidden formatting issues in your message.