Character Counter
Counts what you see as characters, including emoji and accented letters, plus the numbers platforms actually enforce: UTF-16 units, UTF-8 bytes and SMS segments.
Runs entirely in your browser. Your text is not uploaded.
Platform limits
| X (Twitter) post | 280 left |
| Google title tag (approx.) | 60 left |
| Meta description (approx.) | 160 left |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 left |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 left |
| YouTube title | 100 left |
| SMS (GSM-7) | 0 segments |
Under the hood
| Visible characters (graphemes) | 0 |
UTF-16 code units (JavaScript .length) | 0 |
| Unicode code points | 0 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0 |
| Lines | 0 |
What counts as one character?
You see one symbol, but computers may store several pieces. Pick a character and compare the three ways it can be counted. This is why one site says your post has 12 characters and another says 15.
U+1F468 + U+200D + U+1F469 + U+200D + U+1F467
Emoji built from several code points are joined with an invisible Zero Width Joiner (U+200D); flags are two “regional indicator” letters. Unicode's rules for grouping them into one visible character are published in Unicode Standard Annex #29, which is what this site uses to count.
How to use the character counter
- Paste or type your text.
- Check the limits list to see how much room you have left on each platform.
- Open the inspector to see how any single character is stored.
Questions
Does the character count include spaces?
The main number includes spaces, tabs and line breaks. "Without spaces" removes every kind of whitespace. Most platforms count spaces, so use the first number for limits.
Why does an emoji count as 2 characters on some sites?
JavaScript and many databases store text in UTF-16, where emoji and some rare characters need two 16-bit units. A skin-toned thumbs-up is four units and a family emoji can be eleven. We show the visible count and the UTF-16 count side by side so you can see which one a site is using.
How many characters fit in one text message?
A single SMS holds 160 characters if every character is in the GSM-7 alphabet. One emoji or other non-GSM character switches the whole message to UCS-2, which fits 70. Longer messages are split into segments of 153 or 67.
What is the character limit for a meta description?
Google does not set a character limit; it trims snippets to fit the results page, which usually shows roughly 150 to 160 characters on desktop. The limits list uses 160 as a practical guide.