How to use this character counter
- Type or paste your text into the box.
- Read the counts on the right: characters with spaces, without spaces, words, lines and bytes.
- Check the Room left list to see how close you are to common limits.
What counts as a character
Every letter, digit, space, punctuation mark and line break is one character. "Characters without spaces" drops all whitespace, including line breaks. Characters are counted as Unicode code points, so an emoji such as 😀 counts as one. Emoji built from several parts, like a family emoji, and letters written with a separate accent can count as more than one.
Common limits, and how reliable they are
The list shows your room against X (Twitter) posts at 280, one SMS segment at 160 (messages with emoji or non-Latin letters use shorter segments), meta descriptions at about 160, title tags at about 60 and Instagram captions at 2,200.
Treat the search figures as guides, not rules: Google truncates titles and descriptions by pixel width, so a string of narrow letters fits more than a string of wide ones, and it may rewrite them. X also counts links and some characters differently from a plain code-point count.
Why bytes are shown
Some systems limit size in bytes rather than characters. In UTF-8, plain English letters take one byte, accented letters usually two, many Asian scripts three and emoji four, so a short text in another script can be larger than its character count suggests.
Character Counter FAQs
Does the character count include spaces?
The main number includes spaces and line breaks. "Characters without spaces" excludes all whitespace. Both are shown at once.
How many characters can I use in an X post?
The standard limit is 280 characters, though links and some characters are counted differently by X. Use the count here as a guide.
How long can a meta description be?
There is no fixed limit. Google shortens descriptions by pixel width and often writes its own, so about 150 to 160 characters is a common target.
Why are bytes different from characters?
Characters outside plain English take two to four bytes in UTF-8. Bytes matter when a database field or API limits size rather than character count.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. Counting happens in your browser, and your text is kept in localStorage only so it survives a reload. See the privacy page.