Character counter

How to use it

Type or paste text into the box. Every figure updates as you type. A negative number in a “Left of…” box means you are over that limit by that many characters.

What each number means

• Characters: what you see as separate characters, spaces and line breaks included. An emoji with a skin tone, a flag or a letter with a combining accent counts once. A Windows line break (CR + LF) counts as one.
• Without spaces: the same, minus spaces, tabs and line breaks.
• Letters and digits: letters of any alphabet and the digits 0–9 (and digits of other scripts). Punctuation, symbols and emoji are neither.
• Lines: the number of lines, empty ones included.
• Bytes (UTF-8): the size of the text when saved in UTF-8.
• Left of 280 on X: X weighs characters - Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and similar letters count 1, Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters and emoji count 2. Links count as 23 on X whatever their length; this counter counts them as typed.
• SMS messages: how many messages the text takes. GSM alphabet: 160 characters in one message, 153 per part when split; characters ^ { } [ ] ~ | € \ take two places. Any other character: 70, then 67 per part.
• Left of 160 for a meta description: search engines cut snippets by width in pixels, not by a fixed count, so 160 is a practical guide rather than a hard limit.

Worked example

“Привет 2026” has 11 characters: 6 letters, 1 space and 4 digits. In UTF-8 it takes 6 × 2 + 1 + 4 = 17 bytes. Because Cyrillic is not in the GSM alphabet, an SMS with this text uses UCS-2: up to 70 characters fit in one message, so it is 1 message. On X it weighs 11, leaving 269.

Common limits

Tips

If an SMS unexpectedly splits into many parts, look for one stray character outside the GSM alphabet, such as a curly quote or an emoji: replacing it can cut the count by more than half. To count words and reading time instead, use the word counter.