Re: Greek support for SMS: How does it ACTUALLY work?

[Pawel Kot]

Hi,

On 5/15/07, Tirs Abril <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello! After a long time lurking the list :-) I finally have a question to
> ask. After several years using Gnokii as part of an email-to-SMS interface,
> now I need to send SMS in Greek language. To simplify, let's say that I do it
> like this:
>
> cat myfile |gnokii --sendsms 612345789
>
> ("myfile" is a text file derived from the e-mail after some processing, and
> not the e-mail itself, and of course "612345789" is a sample made-up number).
>
> As a result, the receiving phone 6123456789 gets a message where Greek
> characters are all displayed small squares. However, if I send an SMS from a
> Greek cellphone, the Greek characters are displayed fine. Even if I send it
> from the Greek cellphone to the phone connected to Gnokii, they appear fine
> on it, and "gnokii --getsms" reads it correctly. Therefore I believe it is
> not a cellphone problem.

I can't say for greek, but it works for me for the Polish charset.
Could you please send some Greek sentences encoded in UTF-8?

> I have modified the table at "common/gsm-encoding.c", putting the appropiate
> byte values from the GSM 03.38 default character set (i.e. greek Alpha is
> 0x94, greek Gamma is 0x93, etc), replacing the '?' marks.
>
> No matter which encoding I use for the "myfile" text, I cannot get decent
> results. I also tried with the "-8" parameter, to no avail.
>
> Can anyone please tell me:
>
> 1) Which encoding should I use for the Greek text to be piped into Gnokii?

The one, your LC_ALL is set to. Probably some gr_GR-UTF8.

> 2) Which parameter[s] should I use? The only one which appears to do something
> here is -8, but up to now it has been useless in all combinations.

None.

> 3) Any changes to do to Gnokii for the encoding, internal default values (i.e.
> "sms_default" function in "common/gsm-sms.c")?

No. default alphabet is used just when all characters from the input
could be found in it. And default alphabet table is taken from the GSM
standard. So changing it you will only break GSM compatiblity. When
the character is not found in default alphabet, it is converted to
unicode.

take care,
pkot
--
Pawel Kot