Character Counter
Count characters with and without spaces, and see at a glance whether your text fits common platform limits.
How to use the Character Counter
- 1Paste or type your text.
- 2Read the counts — with spaces, without spaces, and bytes.
- 3Check the limit indicators for the platforms you care about.
- 4Trim until the bars turn green.
How it works
Two different counts appear because platforms disagree about what a character is. JavaScript counts UTF-16 code units, which means most emoji count as two and some — flags, family groupings, skin-tone variants — count as more. The grapheme count instead counts what a reader sees as one character. A single 👨👩👧👦 is 11 code units but one grapheme.
The byte count is different again, and it is the one that matters for SMS and for database columns. UTF-8 uses one byte for ASCII, two or three for accented and non-Latin scripts, and four for most emoji.
SMS has its own rule worth knowing: a message using only the GSM 7-bit alphabet fits 160 characters, but a single character outside it — a curly quote, an em dash, an emoji — switches the whole message to UCS-2 and drops the limit to 70. The tool flags this, because it is a common and expensive surprise.
Your text is processed by JavaScript running in this page and is never sent over the network. That matters when you are pasting a draft, a client brief, meeting notes or anything else you would rather not hand to a server.