Text & Writing Tools

Character Counter

Count characters with and without spaces, bytes and lines, and check your text against limits for X posts, meta titles, meta descriptions and SMS.

Paste your text to count characters exactly the way people see them - an emoji or an accented letter counts once.

Your text

Characters

Without spaces

Bytes (UTF-8)

Lines

Common limits

Letters: 0 · Digits: 0

Spaces: 0 · Other: 0

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Platforms count in slightly different ways, so leave a little room below any hard limit.

What Is the Character Counter?

It counts the characters in your text the way a person sees them, with and without spaces, and also the number of bytes and lines. A set of bars shows how your text measures up to common limits: an X post, a Google meta title and description, a single SMS and an Instagram caption.

Why Character Limits Matter

Search results cut off titles and descriptions that are too long.
Social platforms reject or truncate posts over their limit.
An SMS over the limit is split into several messages - and each one is billed.
Database fields and form inputs often have a maximum length.

How to Use It

Type or paste your text.
Check the four totals at the top.
Look at the Common limits bars - a red bar and an "over" count mean the text is too long for that use.

Example

The line Free online tools for developers, writers and students - no sign-up, no uploads. ✅ has 82 characters, 69 without spaces, and takes 84 bytes in UTF-8, because the check-mark emoji takes three bytes. It fits an X post and a meta description, but is 22 characters too long for a meta title. As an SMS, the emoji switches the message to Unicode, where the limit drops from 160 to 70 characters, so it would be sent as two joined messages.

Characters, Bytes and SMS Encoding

The main count treats each visible character as one, so an emoji, an accented letter or a Hindi conjunct such as क्ष counts once even though it is stored as several code points. The byte count is what a database or API measures. SMS uses the 7-bit GSM alphabet when every character is in it (160 per message, or 153 per part when joined) and switches to UCS-2 for anything else (70, or 67 per part).

Limitations

X weighs some characters, such as most emoji and CJK characters, as two, and shortens every link to 23 characters, so treat the X bar as a close estimate. Google truncates titles by pixel width rather than a fixed number of characters. For word totals and reading time, use the Word Counter; to test a title as it would look in search results, use the Meta Title Checker.

Frequently Asked Questions

The main count includes spaces, line breaks and punctuation. The second box shows the count without any spaces or line breaks, which some forms and assignments ask for.

Text is stored in UTF-8, where English letters take one byte, accented letters two, most other scripts three and emoji four. Databases and APIs that limit length in bytes use the byte count.

An SMS holds 160 characters if every character is in the GSM-7 alphabet, or 70 if it contains anything else, such as an emoji or Hindi text. Longer messages are split into parts of 153 or 67 characters.

Google cuts titles by pixel width, which usually allows about 50 to 60 characters, and descriptions at roughly 150 to 160 characters on desktop. Keep the important words at the start.