SMS DemocratA toolkit & knowledge center for progressive SMS campaigns
Free tool

Strip the characters that make texts cost double.

Copy from Word, Google Docs or your notes app and invisible “smart” characters ride along — one curly quote can flip a whole message into the expensive UCS-2 encoding. Paste your text to swap those gremlins for GSM-7-safe equivalents and see the segments you save.

Before
UCS-2
Before segments
3
After
GSM-7
After segments
1
Cleaned 4 characters and cut 2 segments per recipient — a 67% saving on this send.
Cleaned message

Don't miss it - polls are open 7am-8pm on Tuesday. Find your location, RSVP, and bring a friend... every vote counts! Reply STOP to opt out.

  • “’” → “'”curly apostrophe×1
  • “—” → “-”em dash×1
  • “–” → “-”en dash×1
  • “…” → “...”ellipsis×1

Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you paste is sent anywhere. Segment counts use the same GSM-7 / UCS-2 model as our cost calculator.

Where these characters come from

You rarely type them on purpose. Autocorrect and “smart typography” insert them for you, and they’re impossible to spot by eye.

The usual suspects

What you seeWhat it really isCleaned to
’ “ ”Curly “smart quotes”' "
— –Em dash / en dash-
…Ellipsis (one character)...
(space)Non-breaking / zero-width spacenormal space
™ ® © •Typographic symbols(TM) (R) (C) *

Keep them out in the first place

  • Draft campaign copy in a plain-text editor, not Word or Google Docs.
  • Turn off “smart quotes” / “smart punctuation” in your OS and app settings.
  • Run this cleaner as a final check right before you paste into your sending tool.

Once your message is clean, run it through the cost & segment calculator to price the full send, and add a compliant opt-out line with the STOP/HELP footer generator.

Message cleaner FAQ

What does the message cleaner actually change?
It replaces the invisible troublemakers that force a text into the expensive UCS-2 encoding: curly “smart quotes” become straight quotes, en/em dashes become hyphens, the ellipsis “…” becomes three dots, non-breaking and zero-width spaces become normal spaces (or are removed), and symbols like ™ ® © become plain-text equivalents. The wording stays the same — only the characters change.
Why does one curly quote matter so much?
An SMS segment uses one encoding for the whole message. A single character GSM-7 can’t represent — a “smart quote” your editor inserted automatically — flips the entire text to UCS-2, which fits only 70 characters per segment instead of 160. So one invisible character can double or triple the segment count for a big send.
Will cleaning change the meaning of my message?
No. The default swaps are visually near-identical (a straight quote for a curly one, a hyphen for an em dash) and never touch your words. The one setting that alters spelling — “fold accented letters”, which turns José into Jose — is off by default, so you opt in only when you’re sure names can be simplified.
What about emoji or non-Latin alphabets?
Those have no GSM-7 equivalent, so the cleaner leaves them in place and flags them. If you keep them, the message stays UCS-2 by necessity — which is fine for audiences who need Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic or emoji, as long as you’ve priced in the shorter 70-character segments.
Is my message sent anywhere?
No. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded, logged or stored — close the tab and it’s gone.