Character Counter

What this tool does

Character Counter measures text the way people see it: an emoji or an accented letter counts once. Alongside the total it shows characters without spaces, letters, digits, punctuation, UTF-8 bytes and UTF-16 units, remaining characters against your own limit, and a frequency table of every character used.

Many fields are limited by characters rather than words: an SMS segment holds 160 GSM-7 characters, a title tag shows roughly 60, and database columns often cap names at 50 or 255. The difficulty is that “character” means different things to different systems. A family emoji like 👨‍👩‍👧 looks like one symbol, is five Unicode code points, eight UTF-16 units and 18 UTF-8 bytes, so a quick count in one app may not match the limit enforced by another.

This counter splits text into grapheme clusters with the browser’s Intl.Segmenter, which is what a reader perceives as a single character, and reports the technical measures next to it so you can match whichever rule your target system uses. You can also choose whether a line break counts as one character (LF), two (CRLF, as many web forms submit) or none. Everything is computed on your device.

How to use Character Counter

1. Type, paste or drop a text file into “Your text”, or press Sample to see how emoji and accents are counted.
2. Read the highlighted Characters and Without spaces totals; the grid below breaks the text into letters, digits, spaces, punctuation and emoji.
3. Enter your own figure in “Character limit” to see how many characters remain or how far over you are.
4. Pick how line breaks should be counted if your target form treats them differently.
5. Check the Platform limits panel for posts, SMS, title tags and YouTube titles.
6. Use the Character frequency table, and Download CSV if you need the full list.

Tips for better results

• If a database rejects text that looks short enough, compare the UTF-8 bytes figure with the column size; MySQL’s older utf8 columns cannot store four-byte emoji at all.
• JavaScript’s string length reports UTF-16 code units, so an app built on it will count most emoji as two characters.
• One accented letter in an SMS switches the whole message to UCS-2 encoding, cutting a single part from 160 to 70 characters.
• For Twitter-style limits, links are usually shortened to a fixed length, so a long URL may count for less than its visible characters.

Common use cases

• Fitting a meta description, ad headline or app store subtitle inside its character limit.
• Checking that a bulk SMS stays within one billable segment.
• Sizing a VARCHAR column by measuring real UTF-8 byte lengths of sample data.
• Finding which letters dominate a passage for puzzles, ciphers or typography tests.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Assuming characters equal bytes. Hindi, Chinese and emoji take three or four bytes each in UTF-8.
• Forgetting that line breaks count. A form that submits CRLF line endings adds two characters per break.
• Copying text from a word processor that inserted invisible non-breaking or zero-width spaces, which inflate the count.