Character Counter

What counts as a character

A character here is what you see as a single symbol on screen — a letter, digit, space, punctuation mark, line break or emoji. Behind the scenes some of those take more than one unit of storage. An accented letter can be stored as a base letter plus a combining accent, and many emoji, especially those with skin tones or family groupings, are several code points joined together. This counter groups them the way your eye does, using the browser's built-in text segmentation, so "café" is four characters and a family emoji is one.

characters = visible symbols (grapheme clusters)
without spaces = the same count after removing spaces, tabs and line breaks

Worked examples

Example 1: a short message

"See you at 7!" has 13 characters: 8 letters, 1 digit, 3 spaces and 1 punctuation mark. Without spaces it is 10.

Example 2: checking a 160-character limit

Enter 160 as the limit. A message of 172 characters shows the bar in amber and "12 characters over your 160 limit", so you know exactly how much to trim.

Example 3: an emoji in a text message

"Thanks 👍" is 8 visible characters. Because the thumbs-up is not in the basic GSM-7 alphabet, the message switches to Unicode encoding, where one segment holds 70 code units instead of 160 characters.

How to read the result

The headline is the total character count including spaces and line breaks. Below it you see the count without spaces and the word count. If you set a limit, the bar fills toward it and turns amber when you go over, with a running "left" or "over" figure. The table breaks the total into letters, digits, whitespace and punctuation or symbols, counts lines, and estimates SMS segments with the encoding that would be used.

Text message segments explained

Standard SMS, as defined in the 3GPP technical specifications, carries 140 bytes per message. Text written entirely in the GSM-7 alphabet — basic Latin letters, digits, common punctuation and a few accented letters — packs 160 characters into that space. A few symbols, such as the euro sign, square brackets and curly braces, take two slots. If a message contains any character outside GSM-7, including most emoji and many accented letters, the whole message is sent as UCS-2 Unicode and fits only 70 characters. Longer messages are split into parts with a small header, leaving 153 GSM-7 characters or 67 Unicode units per part. Carriers and phones may bill or display each part separately, so a single emoji can turn one message into three.

Where character limits matter

Limits apply to text messages, push notifications, app-store and marketplace product titles, ad headlines and descriptions, form fields in job and university applications, usernames and bios on social platforms, alt text guidelines for images and database fields in software you are designing for. Platforms change their limits from time to time and some count spaces, links or line breaks differently, so check the current rule on the platform itself and enter it as your custom limit here.

Spaces, line breaks and invisible characters

Spaces and line breaks are characters, and most limits count them. Text copied from documents or web pages can also carry invisible characters such as non-breaking spaces, zero-width spaces or a trailing new line, which add to the count without showing. If a count seems one or two higher than expected, check for a blank line at the end. The with-and-without-spaces figures help you match a limit that ignores whitespace, which some forms and translation price quotes do.

Privacy and limits

Counting runs entirely in your browser and nothing you type is uploaded or stored. In browsers without text-segmentation support, the counter falls back to counting Unicode code points, which can count some complex emoji as more than one character. SMS estimates assume standard GSM-7 and UCS-2 rules without national language shift tables, which a few carriers use. For essay-length text where the limit is in words, the word counter adds sentence, paragraph and reading-time statistics. To work out what percentage of a limit you have used, the percentage calculator will do it in one step.

Counting characters in code and data

Developers often need a different measure from writers. Database columns and APIs may limit length in bytes rather than characters; in UTF-8, plain ASCII letters take one byte each, most accented Latin letters two, many Asian scripts three and emoji four. JavaScript's string length property counts UTF-16 code units, so an emoji usually counts as two. The visible-character count here is the right measure for anything a person reads, while a byte or code-unit count matters for storage. If you are designing a form, consider limiting what people can see, and size the storage generously to allow for multi-byte characters.