Character counter

Counting against the limits that matter

Character limits are everywhere — a 60-character title tag before Google truncates it, 160 for a meta description or a single SMS segment, 280 for a post on X. This counter shows the live character, word, line and UTF-8 byte totals, and the progress bars show how close you are to each common cap, turning red the moment you go over. Where the word counter is built around words and reading time, this tool is built around the precise character and byte counts those hard limits actually enforce.

Characters, code points and bytes

“How long is this text?” has more than one answer, so the tool reports a few. The character count is by code point, so an emoji or an astral-plane symbol counts as one character even though it's stored as a larger unit internally. The UTF-8 byte figure is usually the one a server or protocol cares about: plain ASCII is one byte per character, accented Latin letters take two, most CJK characters three, and many emoji four. That's why a tweet of emoji uses far more bytes than its character count suggests.

Why platforms count differently

Don't be surprised if a platform's own counter disagrees with any tool. Some weight certain characters more than one toward their limit, some count a link as a fixed length regardless of the real URL, and SMS in particular switches from 160 characters to just 70 per segment the moment a single non-GSM character (like an emoji or a curly quote) appears. Treat the figures here as an accurate, neutral baseline — and leave a little headroom for the platform that ultimately enforces the cap. To recase or reformat the same text, the case converter sits alongside.