5 ms·
My understanding is that actually there is no extra 20, it's precisely the length of an SMS. SMS is 160 characters, yes -- but in a 7-bit encoding (which is ac
by Sniffnoy 10y ago
My understanding is that actually there is no extra 20, it's precisely the length of an SMS. SMS is 160 characters, yes -- but in a 7-bit encoding (which is actually transmitted as a 7-bit encoding, not padded to octets like ASCII). That makes 140 bytes, which is what Twitter allows (or presumably originally allowed; I guess now longer characters still only count for 1 rather than multiple).
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoNo, there's an extra 20. SMS messages are 140 bytes: 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 UCS-2 16-bit characters. Twitter used 160-character text messages, where 140 characters were the tweet itself, and the rest was the username.