Character Counter

A character counter counts the letters, digits, spaces, punctuation and emoji in a piece of text. Character limits are everywhere: posts on X, Instagram captions, YouTube titles, SMS messages, app store descriptions and the page titles and meta descriptions that show in Google.

This counter shows the total with and without spaces, the UTF-8 size in bytes for developers, the number of SMS parts and their encoding, and a bar for each common limit that turns red when you go over. It counts emoji and accented letters as people see them, not as raw code points.

One visible character can be several code points: a flag emoji is two, a family emoji is up to seven. This counter uses the browser's text segmenter so each visible character counts once. Platforms differ: X counts most emoji and CJK characters as two toward its 280 limit, so treat that bar as a guide.

SMS uses the 7-bit GSM alphabet, 160 characters a message, or 153 per part when split. One emoji or other non-GSM character switches the whole message to Unicode, where the limit drops to 70, or 67 per part.