Character Counter
Count characters with and without spaces and UTF-8 bytes, and check them against a limit.
Why use this tool?
Count characters with and without spaces, plus UTF-8 bytes, and check against a limit such as 280 for X posts or 160 for SMS.
How to use it
- Paste your text.
- Set your character limit.
- Watch the remaining count as you edit.
What the counts mean
Characters with spaces is the total length of the text, including spaces, tabs and line breaks. Characters without spaces leaves out all whitespace, which some forms and assignment rules use. UTF-8 bytes is how much storage the text takes in the most common text encoding on the web: ordinary English letters, digits and punctuation take 1 byte each, accented Latin letters such as é take 2, most Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters take 3, and emoji usually take 4.
The limit box shows how many characters you have left against a number you choose, so you can trim text while you edit rather than after it's rejected.
Common limits
X (Twitter) posts: 280 characters for standard accounts. X counts every link as 23 characters whatever its real length, and counts many Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters as two, so its own counter can differ from a plain count.
SMS: one standard text message holds 160 characters from the basic GSM alphabet. A single character outside that alphabet, such as an emoji or many accented letters, switches the whole message to a different encoding that holds only 70 characters. Longer messages are split into parts of 153 or 67 characters, and each part may be billed separately.
Search results: Google shortens titles and descriptions by their width in pixels rather than a fixed character count, but keeping titles to about 50-60 characters and meta descriptions to about 150-160 characters usually avoids them being cut off.
Why counts sometimes differ between apps
Some characters that look like one symbol are stored as several. Many emoji are made of two or more parts, for example a skin-tone modifier or a family emoji built from several people joined together, and different apps count those parts differently. This counter reports the length the way web browsers store text, which can be higher than the number of symbols you see when emoji are involved.
Line breaks also vary: text copied from Windows programs can contain two characters per line break instead of one. If you're close to a strict limit, check the count in the app where the text will actually be posted.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces count as characters?
Usually yes. Social networks, SMS and most form limits count spaces. The without-spaces figure is for the rarer rules that exclude them.
Why does one emoji count as 2 or more?
Many emoji are stored as two or more units, and some are several emoji joined together, so they use more of a character limit than ordinary letters.
What's the difference between characters and bytes?
Characters are what you see; bytes are how much storage the text takes. In UTF-8 an English letter is 1 byte but an emoji is usually 4, which matters for databases and some APIs with byte limits.