Character Counter

How to use the character counter

1. Type or paste your text into the box.
2. Read the counts as they update live: characters with and without spaces, letters, digits, lines and UTF-8 bytes.
3. Check the remaining characters for the limit you care about, such as an X post, an SMS or a meta description.
4. If your limit isn’t listed, type your own number in the custom limit field and the tool will show how many characters you have left.

What this character counter measures

Many places on the web cap the length of what you write. This tool shows every figure you might need to stay under those caps:

• Characters with spaces: the full length of your text, as most platforms count it.
• Characters without spaces: the same total with spaces left out.
• Letters: alphabetic characters only, including accented letters such as é, ñ or ü.
• Digits: the number characters 0 to 9.
• Lines: how many lines your text spans, useful for lists, poems or code.
• UTF-8 bytes: the storage size of your text, which matters for databases, APIs and some technical fields where the limit is in bytes rather than characters.

Built-in limits

The tool compares your text against common limits and shows how many characters remain, or how far over you are:

• X (Twitter) post: 280 characters
• SMS: 160 characters
• Meta description: 160 characters
• Meta title: 60 characters
• Instagram caption: 2,200 characters

You can also enter a custom limit, for example 150 for a bio, 500 for a form field or 100 for a push notification.

Keep in mind that these figures are general guidelines. For meta titles and descriptions, search engines actually truncate by pixel width, so 60 and 160 characters are safe targets rather than hard rules. For SMS, 160 characters applies to messages using the standard character set; messages containing emoji or some special characters are encoded differently and allow fewer characters per segment.

Emoji, accents and bytes

This counter is grapheme-aware: it counts what you see as one character, as one character. An emoji like 👍 counts as 1, and so does a combined emoji such as a family or a flag, even though it is built from several code points. An accented letter like “é” also counts as 1, whether it is stored as a single code point or as “e” plus a combining accent.

The UTF-8 byte count tells a different story. Plain English letters use 1 byte each, accented letters like “é” use 2 bytes, and most emoji use 4 bytes or more. That’s why a short message full of emoji can be small in characters but large in bytes.

Privacy

Everything runs in your browser. Your text is never sent to a server, so you can check drafts, private messages or unreleased marketing copy without worrying about where it goes.