Smart Nick Detect vs 140-char Limit

When abbreviating a nick during a reply (smart nickname detection), the char count does not accurately reflect all of the chars in the nickname to be expanded. The result, after hitting the 'Enter' key, is an "unknown error" message. The reason for the error isn't necessarily immediately obvious to the user (in my case it happened quite a few times before I clued in), so can you edit the char count routine so that it factors in all of the nick's characters and reports the accurate count to us?