If the max is 140 characters, why can't Twitter show the whole line? Why cut off the last few characters with an ellipsis?

The same for me, twice today.
I got the oups message though my updates were less than 138 characters.

It's bizarre: the ellipsis is there, even though my tweet is entirely shown.

Could it be because of accented characters ?

I did it without accented characters, If you have Vista and let it update or or download go to control panel > Programs and features>installed Updates and uninstall KB938979 and it did the ellipsis after the nine. Honestly the message has no reason to even exist.

Thunderclap, the message did have a reason to exist ! In fact, Twitter uses ASCII to encode accented characters. So an accented character needs more bits to be encoded than 128 "normal" characters : a french accented character counts for two characters without accent, a japanese character (hiragana) counts for 3 (!) basic characters ! A tweet of only 47 japanese characters will exceed the 140 characters limit and will respond by the "oops" message.

Thanks for the vista tip, but completely inappropriate.

Yes, this is an absolutely ridiculous "feature". Twitter's beauty is its simplicity, and with a 140-character limit, there is *no reason* to truncate. Period.

If it's to accommodate the design, then the design is wrong. If it's to... see, I can't even think of another reason.

Here are two screenshots. First, the way my tweet looks on the index pages (truncated):



And second, the way it looks on its own show page (non-truncated):



As you can see, when you add the two ellipses and the spaces, there are actually *more characters in the truncated version than the original!* This is nonsense. And worst of all? It truncated the link in such a way that if you click it (in the truncated version), the URL is "http://tr"!

Twitter, please please please do away with truncation. Whatever nonsense back-end (or front-end) problem truncation "fixes", please address that problem directly and without truncation. It's ludicrous.

I agree, please lose the truncation and show the entire message, just like it used to be!

I asked the question of what characters cause that problem here:http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/what_characters_make_twitter_messages_truncate. Please feel free to contribute. I don't mean to be pluggy, I just want to help my followers have a better time reading my Tweets and others do the same for their followers.

Somehow this is now affecting huge numbers of people since Twitter's latest redesign, and since yesterday in my case, to be exact. At the same time, if you go to twitter and search.twitter.com/ for the term @twitter, you will see a lot of unhappy people. Is Twitter going to ignore this obvious bug which now has become more than inconvenient; it is cutting off URLs in the middle, and I've even had it cut off a USERNAME in the middle! Quotes and ampersands are a nightmare and create a truncated tweet that ends in ellipses and cannot be clicked on.

Twitter, I CAN NO LONGER have a tweet of 140 characters typed in a simple web interface, going through www.twitter.com, if it has quotes or ampersands in it. It truncates.

Twitter, is anyone home? Are you listening? Do you even care?

I would fire the developers. They obviously know nothing about coding. This "simple front end" thing was coded by a monkey.

Well, from what I've heard the trigger is as Game A stated. It is because twitter uses ASCII text. In english, if you use an @ or " in the twitter even though they take up only one visual letter space, ASCII defines them as multiple letters. I know " is defined as " in ASCII. I'm guessing that this prevents the message from being rejected for too many characters and allows the message to be twittered, while at the same time making an error on the display of 140 characters. It frustrates me too. I can't imagine that this isn't a quickly fixable error, but I didn't make twitter so I can't really say.

Counter is just not working from text. Posted update that was 123 characters with no unusal characters and twitter cut it off at 103.

When I use a real "em dash" — (shift option hyphen on my Mac) it gets counted as one character in the twitter counter, but perhaps twitter is counting it as two characters (like the -- it's replacing). I also use a real ellipsis ... (option semi-colon on my mac); is twitter counting it as three characters?

Twitter, please just STOP truncating messages that fit in 140 characters, period.

Here's an example of 108-character tweet:
http://twitter.com/catalystmvc/status...

The end of the URL is replaced with an ellipsis, although there are 32 characters left. This makes copy-and-paste of the real Twitter status IMPOSSIBLE.

Gratuitous truncation is silly. Twitter is not silly. Please fix this dissonance.

my udates cut the whole 2nd line off, well under the 140 character limit