Character Counter for Posts, SMS and SEO
See exactly how long your text is in the units that matter: visible characters, UTF-16 code units and UTF-8 bytes. Preset limits show how much room is left in an X post, an SMS segment, a page title or a meta description.
How to check character limits
- Type or paste your text into the box.
- Read the character, code unit, byte, line and character-type counts.
- Check the length limits panel to see how many characters remain for each preset, or set your own custom limit.
- Copy or download the counts if you need to share them.
Why one emoji can count as two (or more) characters
People see a "character" as one symbol, but software counts differently. The thumbs-up emoji with a skin tone is one visible character, four UTF-16 code units (what JavaScript's length reports) and eight UTF-8 bytes (what many databases limit). SMS is stricter still: a single character outside the GSM-7 alphabet, such as an emoji or a curly quote, switches the whole message to UCS-2 encoding and cuts each segment from 160 to 70 characters. To clean up stray spaces before counting, use Remove Extra Spaces.
Benefits
- Shows grapheme, UTF-16 and UTF-8 counts side by side, so you know which limit you are hitting.
- SMS panel detects GSM-7 versus Unicode encoding and names the characters that force it.
- X post length follows the platform's weighting: links count as 23, emoji and CJK as 2.
Limitations
- The X length is an approximation of the official weighting and may differ by a character or two for rare scripts.
- Search engines truncate titles and descriptions by pixel width, so the 60 and 160 character guides are rules of thumb.
Privacy and security
Your text is measured locally by JavaScript in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server or saved, so marketing copy and private messages stay on your device.
Read our privacy policy for details about the site as a whole.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces count as characters?
Yes. Spaces, line breaks and tabs all count toward the main character total, just as they do on social networks and in SMS. The whitespace tile shows how many of them there are.
Why is my SMS split into more messages than expected?
If the text contains any character outside the GSM-7 alphabet, such as an emoji, the message is sent as Unicode with 70 characters per segment (67 when split). The SMS row lists the characters that triggered it so you can replace them.
What is the difference between characters and bytes?
Characters are what you see; bytes are how much storage the text takes. In UTF-8, English letters use 1 byte, accented letters 2, most Asian characters 3 and emoji 4 bytes.