Character Counter
Count characters with confidence — for tweets, SMS, meta descriptions or anything with a character budget. See total characters, characters without spaces, words and lines, plus live progress bars against the most common platform limits (Twitter, SMS, meta tags, Facebook). Your text never leaves your browser.
Your text is processed in your browser and is not uploaded to a server.
How to use this character counter
- Paste or type your text into the box. Counts update on every keystroke — no submit button.
- Read the two top numbers: total characters (with spaces) and characters-only (spaces stripped). Most platforms count with spaces; SEO tools and printers sometimes count without.
- Watch the progress bars below — they show how your text compares to Twitter (280), SMS (160), meta title (60), meta description (160) and Facebook post limits. Anything red means you're over.
- If you're writing for Twitter or SMS, the bar reflects the practical limit. For SEO meta tags, Google may truncate even when you're under the bar — aim for ~50 chars in titles and under 155 in descriptions to be safe.
- Edit and watch the numbers update live. Nothing is uploaded — your draft stays in your browser tab.
Frequently asked questions
Does it count spaces?
Both numbers are shown: total characters including spaces, and characters with spaces stripped. Most platform limits (Twitter, SMS, meta description) count spaces — use the 'with spaces' number for those. Use the 'without spaces' number for things like print typography or certain academic word-count rules.
Why does one emoji count as 2 characters here but 1 on Twitter?
JavaScript stores most emoji as a surrogate pair (two UTF-16 code units), so the raw string length returns 2. Twitter, SMS gateways and many CMSes count emoji as one grapheme. Treat the number here as a safe upper bound — if it fits this counter, the post will fit the platform too.
Does it count newlines or only visible characters?
Both totals include newlines (each newline is one character). 'Without spaces' only strips space characters, not tabs or newlines — strip those manually if a specific platform counts them differently. Most platforms count newlines as a character, so leaving them in matches what the platform sees.
Why do my SEO meta description characters differ from what Google displays?
Google truncates by pixel width, not character count. A line of all narrow letters ('i', 'l', 'r') fits more characters than one full of wide ones ('M', 'W'). The 155-character rule is a safe approximation, but if your description contains lots of wide letters or numbers, Google may cut it earlier. Test with Google's Rich Results preview, not just character count.
Are Unicode special characters (accents, CJK, RTL) counted correctly?
Latin accents (é, ñ, ü) and most CJK characters count as 1 character each, matching what platforms see. Right-to-left scripts (Arabic, Hebrew) count by character, not by visual position. Combined characters with multiple code points (some emoji variants, combining diacritics) may count as more than 1 — this is technically correct UTF-16 length, but renders as a single visible character. Use the count here as an upper bound.