Character Breakdown
Social Media Limits
How it works
The Character Counter counts individual characters in a string โ by default including spaces, but with an option to exclude them. It also shows the total with and without spaces side by side, along with byte length for multi-byte Unicode text.
Character limits are everywhere: Twitter/X allows 280 characters per post, SMS messages have a 160-character hard limit (with multi-part billing beyond that), meta descriptions should be under 160 characters for Google display, YouTube titles are capped at 100 characters (with 60 optimal), and LinkedIn posts cap at 3,000 characters. Knowing your exact count before publishing prevents truncation.
How to use it: type or paste your text. Character counts update as you type. The tool highlights when you approach common platform limits (160, 280) so you can trim in context.
Byte count note: for plain ASCII text, one character = one byte. For Unicode characters (emojis, accented letters, CJK characters), each character may use 2-4 bytes. If you're storing text in a database column with a byte limit, the byte count is the relevant metric, not the character count.
Practical workflows: trimming meta descriptions to 155-160 characters before publishing, checking tweet length during drafting, counting subject line characters for email campaigns (40-60 characters is optimal for most clients), verifying API request body sizes, and monitoring SMS content before sending.
Your text is processed entirely in the browser โ no content is transmitted to a server.
Frequently Asked Questions
- It counts both. Unicode characters like emoji and accented letters show as 1 character but 2-4 bytes. The byte count is shown separately for contexts where storage limits are measured in bytes (like database column lengths).
- Twitter/X allows 280 characters per tweet for standard users. URLs always count as 23 characters regardless of actual length. The counter shows your count against the 280 limit when Twitter mode is toggled.
- Word documents often contain invisible Unicode characters โ smart quotes, non-breaking spaces, and soft hyphens โ that add to the character count. Use the Text Cleaner tool first to normalize these.
- Yes. Each emoji counts as 1 character for display purposes. For byte size, each emoji is typically 4 bytes (for emoji in the U+1F000+ range).