Tinker Tools

Character Counter Online

Count characters with and without spaces, words, lines, and bytes. Track social media character limits with visual progress bars.

Text Input0 characters

How it works

1. Enter Your Text

Type or paste any text into the editor. Supports all languages including multi-byte characters and emoji.

Any Language

2. View Statistics

See character count with and without spaces, word count, line count, and UTF-8 byte size updated in real time.

Real-Time

3. Check Social Limits

Track progress against character limits for Twitter/X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube with visual progress bars.

Stay Within Limits

What is a Character Counter?

A character counter measures the exact number of individual characters in a piece of text. Every letter, digit, punctuation mark, space, and special symbol counts as one character. This is distinct from word counting because a single word can be anywhere from one character to dozens -- think of the difference between 'a' and 'internationalization.' Character counting becomes essential when you are working with systems that enforce strict character limits. Twitter/X allows 280 characters per post. SMS messages split at 160 characters for GSM encoding or 70 for Unicode. Meta descriptions in search results get truncated around 155-160 characters. Missing a limit by even one character can mean your message gets cut off mid-sentence or your post fails to submit entirely.

The distinction between characters with spaces and characters without spaces is more important than most people realize. Many academic style guides -- particularly those for abstracts in scientific journals -- specify limits in characters including spaces. Others use characters excluding spaces. A 500-character abstract with spaces might only be 420 characters without them. If you apply the wrong counting method, you could end up trimming content unnecessarily or exceeding the actual limit. Always confirm which method your target platform or publication uses before you start cutting.

Unicode complicates character counting in ways that trip up even experienced developers. A single visible character on screen might be composed of multiple Unicode code points. The flag emoji for a country uses two regional indicator symbols. Accented characters can be represented as a single precomposed code point or as a base character plus a combining diacritical mark. The family emoji is made of multiple person emoji joined by zero-width joiners. A reliable character counter handles these edge cases by counting grapheme clusters -- the units that a human perceives as single characters -- rather than raw code points or UTF-16 code units.

Key Features and Benefits

  • Characters With and Without Spaces — The counter shows both counts simultaneously so you never have to guess which metric you need. Spaces typically account for 15-20% of total characters in English prose. When you are working against a tight limit, knowing both numbers helps you decide whether removing a few spaces -- by shortening sentences or eliminating unnecessary phrases -- will get you under the cap without losing meaningful content.
  • Social Media Limit Indicators — Built-in visual indicators show how close you are to common platform limits: 280 for Twitter/X, 2,200 for Instagram captions, 500 for Mastodon, 63,206 for Facebook posts. A progress bar or color-coded warning tells you at a glance whether you are in the safe zone, approaching the limit, or over it. This saves you the mental arithmetic of subtracting your count from the limit every time you check.
  • Line and Paragraph Breakdown — Some character limits apply per line rather than per block. Git commit message conventions suggest 50 characters for the subject line and 72 characters per body line. HTTP header values have practical limits around 8,192 characters in most servers. The counter breaks down characters per line so you can spot lines that exceed your target width without scanning manually.
  • Byte Size Calculation — Characters and bytes are not the same thing. The letter 'A' is one byte in UTF-8. A Chinese character takes three bytes. An emoji can take four. When you are working with systems that limit payload size in bytes rather than characters -- database VARCHAR columns, API request bodies, URL length limits -- the byte count is what matters. The counter shows both character count and byte size in UTF-8 encoding so you can track both dimensions.
  • Real-Time Updates on Every Keystroke — The count refreshes instantly as you type, delete, or paste. There is no lag and no need to press a recalculate button. This immediate feedback is critical when you are editing down to a limit. You can watch the number drop as you trim a sentence and know the moment you hit your target. For writers who regularly work with character limits, this real-time loop becomes second nature.
  • Whitespace and Invisible Character Detection — Text copied from web pages, PDFs, and rich text editors often contains invisible characters: non-breaking spaces, zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, and byte-order marks. These add to your character count without being visible in the text. The counter highlights or flags these hidden characters so you can remove them. A single zero-width space at the start of a string has caused countless bugs in form validation and data processing pipelines.

How to Count Characters Effectively

  1. 1

    Enter Your Text

    Paste or type your content into the input field. If you are copying from a formatted source like a Word document or web page, be aware that hidden formatting characters may come along for the ride. The counter will pick these up even if you cannot see them. For the cleanest count, paste into a plain text editor first to strip formatting, then copy from there into the counter.

  2. 2

    Check Both Character Metrics

    Look at the characters-with-spaces and characters-without-spaces counts. Determine which one applies to your situation. If you are writing a tweet, total characters including spaces is what Twitter/X counts. If you are filling in a database field with a VARCHAR(255) limit, the comparison depends on whether the database counts bytes or characters -- MySQL's VARCHAR counts characters in utf8mb4, while some legacy systems count bytes.

  3. 3

    Monitor Platform-Specific Limits

    Select the platform you are targeting from the preset options. The counter will show a visual indicator of how much room you have left. When the indicator turns yellow, you are within 10% of the limit. Red means you have exceeded it. This traffic-light system prevents the unpleasant surprise of composing a long, thoughtful reply only to discover you are 40 characters over and need to find something to cut.

  4. 4

    Identify and Remove Hidden Characters

    Toggle the invisible character view to see if any zero-width spaces, byte-order marks, or non-breaking spaces are hiding in your text. These are particularly common when copying from PDFs or Microsoft Word. A non-breaking space looks identical to a regular space but occupies a different Unicode code point -- U+00A0 versus U+0020. Some systems treat these differently, which can cause issues with text processing, search, and comparison operations.

  5. 5

    Trim and Refine to Hit Your Target

    If you are over the limit, start trimming. Remove unnecessary adverbs and filler phrases first. Replace long words with shorter synonyms where the meaning stays the same. Cut redundant clauses. Watch the counter drop in real time as you edit. If you are significantly over the limit, restructure sentences rather than just removing words -- a complete rewrite of one bloated sentence often saves more characters than shaving individual words across five sentences.

Expert Tips for Character Counting

Different platforms count characters differently, and the details matter. Twitter/X counts most characters as one but uses a weighted system for certain scripts and URLs. A URL in a tweet always counts as 23 characters regardless of its actual length because Twitter wraps it with t.co shortening. CJK characters -- Chinese, Japanese, Korean -- count as two characters toward the 280 limit. So a tweet written entirely in Japanese actually has a 140-character limit in practice. If you write for multilingual audiences, test your character counts against the specific platform's rules rather than relying on a generic counter.

Database character limits are a frequent source of bugs. A MySQL column defined as VARCHAR(255) with utf8mb4 encoding stores up to 255 characters, but each character can occupy up to 4 bytes, meaning the actual storage is up to 1,020 bytes. PostgreSQL's VARCHAR behaves similarly. However, if you are working with an older system using Latin-1 encoding, one character always equals one byte, so the character limit and byte limit are identical. When you see a truncation error in production, the first thing to check is whether the limit is in characters or bytes and what encoding the column uses.

For SMS messaging, character encoding changes the effective limit dramatically. A standard SMS using GSM 7-bit encoding holds 160 characters. The moment you include a character outside the GSM alphabet -- a curly quote, an emoji, most non-Latin scripts -- the message switches to UCS-2 encoding and the limit drops to 70 characters. A single emoji in an otherwise plain-text message can cut your available space by more than half. Professional SMS platforms work around this by automatically detecting encoding and splitting long messages into concatenated segments, but each segment costs money, so keeping your character count efficient saves budget on high-volume campaigns.

When counting characters for HTML meta descriptions, remember that Google does not actually enforce a fixed character limit. It truncates based on pixel width, which varies by character. The letter 'i' takes far less horizontal space than 'W' in most fonts. The commonly cited 155-160 character guideline is an approximation based on average character width. If your meta description uses lots of narrow characters, you might fit 170. If it is heavy on wide characters and capital letters, it might get cut at 140. For the safest results, keep important information -- your key message and call to action -- within the first 120 characters so it always shows in full.

Related Tools

Word Counter

Get word-level statistics alongside character counts

Text Case Converter

Convert text case while monitoring character limits

Lorem Ipsum Generator

Generate text that fits specific character limits

Character counting is one piece of the text analysis puzzle. You will often use it alongside word counting to meet dual requirements -- a blog post might need to be under 2,000 words and its meta description under 160 characters. When preparing text for different platforms, converting case for titles and headings while staying within limits is a common workflow. And when designing layouts, generating placeholder text at exact character lengths helps you test how the UI handles edge cases like maximum-length inputs.

Frequently Asked Questions

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