Character counter
Characters with and without spaces, lines and bytes in a text.
Calculator inputs
Results
Enter your values and press “Calculate” to see the result.
In short
- What it calculates
- Characters with and without spaces, lines and bytes in a text.
- Formula used
Characters = text length in Unicode- Example
- The text “Hello, how are you?” has 19 characters with spaces and 16 without, and occupies 19 bytes in UTF-8.
Character counter
Character limits are everywhere: social media bios, messages, form fields, titles and descriptions.
Here you can see at a glance how long your text is and whether it fits.
How it works
Visible Unicode characters are counted, with and without spaces. Bytes are computed for UTF-8 encoding, where an accented letter takes two.
Formula
Characters = text length in Unicode
Bytes = actual size in UTF-8
Worked example
The text “Hello, how are you?” has 19 characters with spaces and 16 without, and occupies 19 bytes in UTF-8.
Explanation
Every platform counts its own way
X allows 280 characters, but a link always takes 23 regardless of its real length, and some non-Latin characters count double. An SMS is 160 characters in basic Latin, but drops to 70 as soon as an accented letter appears, because the encoding changes. Before trimming text to a limit, find out what the destination system counts.
The limits that matter on the web
A page title displays in full up to about 60 characters, and a meta description up to about 155 on desktop. Exceeding them is not penalised, but the search engine truncates the sentence where it suits, and the lost part is usually the call to action.
A character is not a byte
Accented letters, characters from other scripts and emoji take between two and four bytes in UTF-8. A database field limited to 255 bytes does not hold 255 characters if the text carries accents. It is the cause of many strings truncated mid-word.
Emoji complicate the count
Some emoji are really several characters joined by invisible markers: a flag is two symbols and a family can be half a dozen. Depending on how the tool counts, the same emoji may be worth one or seven.
Frequently asked questions
Why are there more bytes than characters?
In UTF-8 accented letters and emoji take two to four bytes. Some systems impose limits in bytes rather than characters.
Do spaces and line breaks count?
Yes, in the count with spaces. The count without any spaces or line breaks is shown separately.
Why did my SMS split before 160 characters?
Because a single accented letter changes the message encoding and the limit drops from 160 to 70 characters per segment.
How much does an emoji count for?
It depends on the emoji and the counting method. Many combine several symbols, so one can count as two, four or more characters.
Need to calculate something else?
These tools are often used alongside this calculator.
Word count
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Title and meta
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Change case
Turn text into uppercase, lowercase, title case, snake_case or camelCase.
Reading time
How long a text takes to read, silently or aloud.