Why count characters
Many places set a hard cap on text length: a post on X (formerly Twitter), a text message, the description shown in search results, an app store listing, a form field or a database column. A character counter tells you at a glance whether you fit. This one counts as you type, shows the total with and without spaces, and also reports words, lines and the number of bytes the text takes up when saved as UTF-8.
What counts as a character
Computers can count text in several ways. A "character" as a reader sees it, such as the letter é, a Chinese character or a family emoji, can be built from several underlying code points. This tool uses your browser's text segmentation, where available, to count what a reader would call a character, so a flag emoji counts as one. Bytes are different again: plain English letters use one byte each, accented letters two, many Asian scripts three, and emoji four. Systems with limits in bytes, such as some databases and APIs, count this way.
Using the limits table
- X posts are usually capped at 280 characters for standard accounts, although the service counts links and some characters differently from a plain count.
- SMS messages hold 160 characters in the basic GSM alphabet, but only 70 if they contain characters such as emoji, which switches the encoding. Longer messages are split into parts.
- Meta descriptions and title tags: search engines cut off displayed snippets by pixel width, and about 155 to 160 characters for descriptions and about 60 for titles are the usual guides.
- YouTube titles allow 100 characters, and Instagram captions up to 2,200.
Counting rules in detail
Spaces, tabs and line breaks all count as characters in the main total. The "without spaces" figure removes all whitespace, including line breaks. Words are runs of letters or digits separated by whitespace, so punctuation on its own is not a word. An empty box shows zero everywhere.
Privacy
Your text never leaves the page. The counting runs entirely in your browser, so it is fine to check drafts, private messages or work documents.