My vocalized Arabic message exceeds the SMS system's character limit even though it's short; will removing diacritics shorten it?

Why a short message counts as long

When you look at «مَرْحَبًا» you see five letters with marks on them. The computer stores it as a sequence: mim, then fatha, then ra, then sukun, and so on. A mark is not part of its letter; it is a character that follows the letter and is drawn over it. So a four-word vocalized message can be longer, by the system's count, than a six-word unvocalized one.

An example in numbers

The message: «مَرْحَبًا بِكُمْ فِي مَتْجَرِنَا». We measured it in the Word and character counter before and after stripping the marks:

• Before: 32 Unicode code points, 61 UTF-8 bytes, 4 words and 19 characters as read.
• After removing the default groups: 19 code points, 35 bytes, 4 words and 19 characters as read.

The tool removed 13 marks: 1 tanwin, 9 harakat and 3 sukun. The gap between 32 and 19 is exactly those marks. The visible character count stayed at 19 both times, because a mark does not count as a visible character of its own.

When it helps and when it does not

It depends on how your system counts, and we cannot tell you how any particular one does it, so check your SMS provider's documentation:

• If the system counts code points or bytes, which is usual for SMS and for database fields, every mark you remove saves a character.
• If it counts characters as the eye sees them, the marks never added to the count, and stripping them changes nothing. Look for another cause, such as extra spaces or stretched letters.

A practical test: measure your message in the word counter and compare its numbers with what your system reports. If the system's number matches the code point count, stripping will help.

Steps

1. Paste the message into the Arabic diacritic remover and leave the default groups on.
2. Look at «Marks removed»: that is how many characters you saved.
3. Copy the result and measure it in the word counter to confirm it is under the limit.
4. Reread before sending: a word that becomes ambiguous without marks, such as عَلِمَ and عُلِمَ both turning into علم, is worth rephrasing.

A middle way: keep only what matters

You do not have to remove everything. If a shadda prevents confusion in one word, switch off the «Shadda» group and remove the rest. If a single word needs a vowel, strip everything and add that one mark back by hand. Each mark you keep costs one character, and you decide where it is worth it.