Is unicode not supported in clickatell SMS extension?

Question

I have CiviCRM 5.13 on Drupal7 with the clickatell v4.1 extension for SMS. Clickatell integration works, I can send test SMS via HTTPS from the browser to test phones. Database and environment is set to UTF-8.

However, if a mass SMS is compiled in https://example.com/civicrm/sms/send?reset=1, or a direct SMS is sent, the non-English characters, like é,á,... are lost or transformed in the SMS body. If the same text is sent over HTTPS/curl directly to Clickatell, there is no such issue.

Is it a CiviCRM issue, or a misconfiguration on my side? How can I track it down?

Answer 1

I suspect the unicode issue arises from the clickatell extension. It uses the utf8_decode() function to decode the message text from a UTF-8 string to ISO-8859-1 before posting to Clickatell. Hence Clickatell manages UTF-8 messages, the use of utf8_decode() is not necessary, and removing it resolves my issue above.

Replace original code:

$postDataArray['text'] = utf8_decode(substr($message, 0, 460)); // max of 460 characters, is probably not multi-lingual
$postDataArray['content'] = utf8_decode(substr($message, 0, 460)); // max of 460 characters, is probably not multi-lingual

to this one:

$postDataArray['text'] = substr($message, 0, 460); // max of 460 characters, is probably not multi-lingual
$postDataArray['content'] = substr($message, 0, 460); // max of 460 characters, is probably not multi-lingual

I'll provide a patch to Clickatell extensions, if this solution gets confirmed by the community.