Character counter

Live character count with and without spaces, plus common platform limits.

Type or paste text to see the exact character count. Handy when a field has a hard limit and you need to trim to fit.

Common character limits

How to use it

1. Paste your text into the box.
2. Check Characters for the total and No spaces for the count without whitespace.
3. Trim until you are inside the limit you need.

What this tool does

The counter reports two numbers that platforms care about: total characters including spaces, and characters with every space, tab and line break removed. Both update as you type, so you can trim a sentence and watch it drop under the limit instead of pasting into the target field and hoping.

A character is one Unicode code point: a letter, a digit, a punctuation mark, a space, or a line break. A line break counts as one character even though you cannot see it — which is why a text that looks like 158 characters can be rejected at 160.

Character limits worth remembering

These are the limits people hit most often. Where a platform truncates rather than blocks, the number is the point at which text starts disappearing.

Two of these hide a trap. A URL in a post on X always costs 23 characters no matter how long it is, so shortening links there gains you nothing. And an SMS containing a single emoji or a curly quote switches the whole message from GSM-7 to UCS-2 encoding, cutting each segment from 160 characters to 70.

Emoji, accents and surrogate pairs

Not every visible character costs one unit. Text is stored as UTF-16 in browsers and in most APIs, and characters above the basic range take two units — a surrogate pair. Many platforms count those units rather than the symbols you see.

The practical rule: if your text is within five characters of a hard limit and contains emoji, test it in the real field. If it is comfortably under, ignore the whole issue.

The same applies to invisible characters. A zero-width space, a non-breaking space pasted from Word, or a trailing newline all consume length while showing nothing. Run the text through the text cleaner first if the count looks higher than it should.

When you need it

• Writing meta tags. Titles and descriptions are the classic case: too long and the snippet is cut mid-word, too short and you waste space.
• Bios and profiles. Instagram, X and LinkedIn all cap the bio, and the editor usually will not tell you by how much you are over.
• Bulk SMS. Every 160 characters is a separate billable segment, so a 165-character message costs double.
• Database fields and forms. A VARCHAR(255) column truncates silently. Checking the length beforehand is faster than debugging why the last words vanished.
• Ad copy. Search and display ad headlines and descriptions are all character-capped, and the ad platform rejects the whole asset if one field is over.
• Subtitles. Around 42 characters per line, two lines maximum, is the usual broadcast convention.

Doing it without this tool

• Microsoft Word: Review → Word Count lists characters with and without spaces in the same dialog.
• Google Docs: Tools → Word count shows a character total; there is no without-spaces figure, so subtract the spaces yourself.
• Excel or Google Sheets: =LEN(A1) for the total and =LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","")) for the count without spaces.
• Notepad++: View → Summary, which also counts a selection.
• Command line: wc -m file.txt counts characters, wc -c counts bytes — they differ the moment the file is not pure ASCII.
• Browser console: "your text".length gives the UTF-16 length, which is exactly what most platform limits measure.

Privacy: your text never leaves your browser

Counting happens in JavaScript on the page. Nothing is uploaded, logged or stored, and there is no account to create. Reload the page and the box is empty.

That is worth checking for a character counter specifically, because the text people measure is often a bio, a customer message or an unreleased product description. You can verify it in the Network tab of your browser developer tools: type into the box and no request appears.

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Frequently asked questions