Character counter

How to use the character counter

1. Type in the box, or paste your text into it.
2. The big numbers count its characters, with and without spaces, and its words and lines are under them.
3. Common limits shows the room left in each, or how far over your text goes.
4. Edit the text until it fits, then copy it back.

The counting happens in your browser: nothing you type is sent anywhere. To count sentences and reading time too, use the word counter.

What counts as a character

A character is anything you type: a letter, a digit, a space, a punctuation mark, a line break. The counter counts them as you see them, so an emoji or an accented letter counts as one.

Characters counts everything, spaces and line breaks included. Without spaces leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks. Most limits count spaces, so the first number is usually the one to check.

Common limits and what happens past them

Where	Limit	Past the limit
A post on X	280	It isn’t accepted, unless the account pays for longer posts
A text message (SMS)	160, or 70	It’s sent in several parts
A Google page title	about 60	Google cuts it with “…”
A meta description	about 155	Google cuts it with “…”
A YouTube title	100	It isn’t accepted
An Instagram caption	2,200	It isn’t accepted
A LinkedIn post	3,000	It isn’t accepted

Instagram and LinkedIn also fold long texts behind a “more” link, so put what matters first.

These counts are close, not always exact: X counts a link as 23 characters and an emoji as 2, and Google cuts titles and descriptions by their width on screen.

Text messages: 160, 153, 70 and 67

A text message holds 160 characters when it uses only the SMS alphabet: plain letters, digits, common signs and some accented letters, like é, ü and ñ. A few signs, like € and [ ], take two places.

One character outside that alphabet, like an emoji, a curly apostrophe (’) or a long dash (—), switches the whole message to a code that holds only 70. An emoji usually takes two of those places, or more.

A longer text is sent in parts that the phone joins back together. Each part keeps a few places to say where it fits, so it holds 153 characters, or 67. Texting services for businesses usually charge for each part.

An example

Type this reminder into the box:

Hi Sam, your table for 4 is booked for Friday at 7:30 pm. Reply YES to confirm or call us to change it. See you soon!

The counter shows 117 characters, 92 without spaces and 26 words. It fits in one text message, with 43 characters left.

Add “ 🙂” at the end: the count grows by only 2, to 119, but the emoji switches the message to 70 characters, and the counter shows 2 messages.

Tips to shorten your text

• Cut words that add nothing: “just”, “really”, “in order to”.
• Use digits: “4” rather than “four”.
• Put the key words first, as titles and long posts get cut at the end.
• Keep text messages plain: swap ’ for ’ and — for -, and leave out emoji, to stay at 160 a message.
• Shorten links in text messages, but not on X, where a link always counts as 23.