Character Counter — Check Text Against SMS, Post and Meta Limits

How to use the character counter

1. Type or paste your text into Your text.
2. Pick a limit from Check against a limit: title tag (60), meta description (155), SMS (160), X / Twitter post (280), Instagram caption (2,200), LinkedIn post (3,000), no limit, or Custom….
3. If you chose Custom, enter your number in Custom limit.
4. Read Remaining, or Over the limit by if you have gone past it, along with the other counts.

What it does and when to use it

Short-form writing lives or dies by character limits. A meta description that runs long gets cut off in search results. An SMS that is one character too long can be billed as two messages. A form field might quietly drop whatever you type past its limit. This tool tells you exactly where you stand, so you can edit before you paste.

Besides the headline count, you get words, lines, letters, digits, spaces and unique characters. The unique character count ignores case and whitespace, which makes it a quick way to spot a stray symbol in a string you are debugging. For longer writing, where words matter more than characters, the Word Counter Pro adds sentences, paragraphs and reading time.

How it works

The tool reports three different ways of measuring the same text, because different systems use different ones:

• Characters counts what a reader sees. The tool uses the browser’s built-in text segmenter, so “é” or “👍🏽” counts as one character.
• UTF-16 code units is what JavaScript’s length returns, and what many web forms and character counters report. Most emoji count as two units here.
• UTF-8 bytes is how much storage or bandwidth the text takes. Plain English letters are one byte each, accented letters are two, and emoji are usually four.

The limit check compares the Characters figure with the limit you picked. Everything runs in your browser.

Worked examples

A short greeting. “Hello, world!” is 13 characters, 12 without spaces. Against the SMS preset of 160, the tool shows Remaining: 147.

A title tag that runs long. “Free tools that run in your browser. Your files never leave your device.” is 72 characters. Checked against the title tag preset of 60, the tool shows Over the limit by: 12, so a dozen characters need to go.

An emoji with a skin tone. “Thanks 👍🏽” is 8 characters as you see them. But it is 11 UTF-16 code units and 15 UTF-8 bytes, because the thumbs-up and its skin-tone modifier are stored as two separate symbols of two code units each. A form that counts code units would see 11, not 8.

Limits and tips

• X / Twitter counts every link as 23 characters, whatever its real length. This tool counts the characters you typed, so a post with long links has more room than it seems.
• A line here is a line break you typed. A long paragraph that wraps on screen still counts as one line.
• If a count looks too high, there may be hidden characters such as zero-width spaces from a copy and paste. The Invisible Character Remover finds and removes them.
• To see which letters appear most, use Letter Frequency. To clean up a list before counting, try Remove Duplicate Lines.