Why is it that sometimes when I receive a text message from the Philippines, it contains gibberish characters like and other weird characters?
This problem usually occurs with forwarded SMS messages like jokes, quotations or chain-letters that are passed from phone to phone. Normal (the ones you type from your phones keyboard) SMS messages are not affected by this problem. There are at least two possible reasons for this problem, both are beyond our control. The first possibility is that some older phones do not support the use of special characters while others do. Special characters are characters that are not in the alphabet, a number or the usual punctuation marks like comma, period, semicolon, colon, etc. Special characters include the peso sign, , , , , , , etc. Authors of these forwarded messages use these special characters for artistic effect and to abbreviate words. For a more extensive list of special characters, please go to: http://www.unicode.org/charts If a person who has a newer phone (that supports SC), creates a message (or receives a forwarded message) that contains special characters, and forwards it to a
