ToolRun How the character counter works
Type or paste text and the counts update instantly: characters with and without spaces, words, lines, and size in bytes. Below the counts, progress bars show how your text compares with common platform limits, and turn red when you go over.
Characters are counted the way people see them, so an emoji such as 👍🏽 or a flag counts as one character even though it is stored as several code points. Your text never leaves your browser.
Common character limits
- X (Twitter): 280 characters per post for standard accounts. X counts some characters, such as emoji and Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters, as two, so long posts with emoji may hit the limit sooner.
- SMS: 160 characters per message using the standard GSM alphabet. Messages containing emoji or many non-Latin characters use Unicode encoding, which allows only 70 characters per message.
- Google search titles and descriptions: Google truncates by pixel width rather than a fixed count; around 60 characters for titles and 155 for descriptions are common guidelines.
- Instagram captions: up to 2,200 characters. LinkedIn posts: up to 3,000. YouTube titles: up to 100.
Characters vs bytes
Some databases, forms, and APIs limit size in bytes rather than characters. In UTF-8, English letters take 1 byte each, accented letters usually 2, many Asian characters 3, and emoji 4, so the byte count can be much higher than the character count. Need word counts and reading time instead? Use the Word Counter.