Character Counter

What this character counter does

Character limits are everywhere: 280 for a post on X, 100 for a YouTube title, around 160 before a search engine truncates your meta description. This tool counts your text the way those systems count it and tells you how much room is left.

It also reports the byte size, which matters when a database column or an API caps the payload rather than the visible length. A 100-character English sentence is 100 bytes; the same length in Korean is closer to 300.

How to use it

1. Paste or type your text into the box.
2. Read the four headline counts: characters, characters without spaces, words and lines.
3. Scan the limits table. Green means comfortable, amber means you are within 10 percent of the limit, red means over.
4. To track a limit that is not listed — a form field capped at 512, say — enter it in Your own limit.
5. Trim, then copy the summary if you need to report the numbers to somebody else.

How characters and bytes are measured

The character count is the number of UTF-16 code units, which is exactly what nearly every platform limit is measured in. For ordinary Latin text this is what you would count by hand. Characters beyond the basic range — most emoji, some historic scripts — take two units each, so a single 🎉 uses two of your 280.

Switch on Count emoji as one character and the tool segments the text into graphemes instead, so a flag, a skin-tone modifier or a family emoji counts as one visible symbol. That is the number a human would give, but it is not the number the platform enforces, so use it for design work rather than for fitting a limit.

Characters without spaces strips every whitespace character, including tabs, line breaks and the non-breaking spaces that often arrive when you paste from a web page.

Bytes shows the size after UTF-8 encoding: one byte for ASCII, two for most accented Latin and Cyrillic letters, three for Korean, Chinese and Japanese, four for most emoji.

SMS deserves a note. A single message segment holds 160 characters using the GSM-7 alphabet, but if your text contains any character outside that alphabet — including curly quotes, em dashes and emoji — the whole message switches to a 70-character segment. The table shows the GSM-7 figure; check with your provider when the message is close to the edge.

Practical examples

Meta description. "Learn how to trim a meta description so search engines show the whole thing instead of cutting it off mid-sentence." That is 113 characters — comfortably inside the roughly 160 that fit before truncation, with room for a brand name.

Post with emoji. "Shipping today 🚀🚀🚀" looks like 18 characters. The counter reports 21, because each rocket costs two. Three emoji quietly ate the space of six letters.

Byte trap. The Korean phrase "안녕하세요 반갑습니다" is 11 characters but 31 bytes. A field described as "32 bytes" holds only ten Korean characters, not thirty-two.

When you need it

• Fitting a social post before it gets cut off, or before the platform refuses to publish it.
• Writing SEO titles and descriptions that display in full in search results.
• Checking a product name or SKU description against a marketplace field limit.
• Sizing an SMS or push notification so it stays in one segment.
• Confirming that translated copy still fits the layout it was written for.
• Validating input for a database column defined in bytes rather than characters.

Privacy and security

Counting happens in your browser. The captions, headlines and internal descriptions you paste never reach a server, so there is no copy of an unpublished campaign sitting in someone else's logs.

Your option choices — including a custom limit — are saved in your own browser so the tool opens ready to go next time. Nothing else is stored. The privacy policy has the full detail.