Character counter

Characters, counted every way a platform counts them

Type below for a live character count — with spaces, without spaces, letters only, and in bytes. Underneath, your text is lined up against the commonly published limits for posts, bios, ads and search snippets, with the room you have left on each.

Platform character limits, with notes

Which character count do you need?

With spaces is the count almost every platform limit uses — an X post's 280 characters include the spaces. Without spaces turns up in academic and translation work, where pricing and length rules are often set on characters excluding whitespace. Letters only strips digits and punctuation as well; the dedicated letter counter breaks letters down by case and frequency.

One wrinkle: characters are not bytes, and not always what you see. This counter counts Unicode code points, so 👍 is one character. In UTF-8 storage it takes 4 bytes, and some older systems count it as 2 units (a UTF-16 surrogate pair) — which is exactly why an emoji costs double in an SMS message. Accented letters can also be stored as one character or as a base letter plus a combining mark; if a platform's count disagrees with yours by a few, this is usually why.

Frequently asked questions

How many characters are in my text right now?

Look at the first tile above — it updates as you type. The same text counted without spaces is in the second tile.

Does X count characters the way this page does?

Nearly. X weights some characters differently — most emoji and CJK characters count as 2 toward the 280 limit, and links are wrapped and counted at a fixed length. Treat this page's number as exact for plain Latin text and a close guide otherwise.

Why is the meta description limit "about" 160?

Search engines truncate by pixel width, not by a fixed character count, so the safe working range is roughly 150–160 characters on desktop and less on mobile. The table uses 160 as the commonly cited planning value.