Character Counter

Many places that accept text have strict length limits: posts on X, SMS messages, app store descriptions, Google titles and meta descriptions, form fields and ad copy. This character counter shows the exact count as you type, with and without spaces and line breaks, plus UTF-8 byte size and the number of SMS segments, so you can fit your message first time.

Common uses

• Write X (Twitter) posts and Mastodon toots that fit without being cut off.
• Keep page titles under about 60 characters and meta descriptions under about 160 for search results.
• Plan SMS campaigns and know exactly how many segments each message will use.
• Check database field limits, usernames and form inputs measured in bytes.

Tips for best results

• Put the most important words first; search engines and feeds truncate long text from the end.
• Avoid curly quotes and special dashes in SMS if you want to stay within GSM-7.
• Count bytes rather than characters for databases or APIs with byte limits.
• Turn off counting spaces when a limit is defined “excluding spaces”, as some academic forms are.

Characters, bytes and graphemes

Computers can count text in different ways. A grapheme is what a reader sees as one character, such as “é” or “👍🏽”. Under the hood that may be several code points, and in UTF-8 each code point takes one to four bytes. Latin letters use one byte, most European accented letters two, and Chinese, Japanese, Hindi or Arabic characters usually three. This is why a 255-byte database field may hold far fewer than 255 characters of non-English text.

Platform limits at a glance

The limit bars cover common targets: 280 characters for a standard X post, 2,200 for an Instagram caption, 3,000 for a LinkedIn post, 100 for a YouTube title and 125 characters before Facebook shows “See more”. Google does not use a fixed character limit for titles and snippets; it truncates by pixel width, so 50–60 and 150–160 characters are safe guides rather than rules.