Character Count Tool
Your text
Character counts
Start typing above — the results update as you write.
Count characters with and without spaces, plus code points, bytes and grapheme clusters, so you know exactly why a platform, database or form counts your text the way it does.
What is Character Count Tool?
Character counts are rarely wrong, but they disagree with each other constantly — and the disagreement is the point. A text field that stops accepting input at 280 characters is counting UTF-16 code units. A database column that stores 65,535 bytes is counting UTF-8. A designer checking whether a label fits is looking at user-perceived characters. The Character Count Tool shows all of these at once, labelled, so you can stop guessing which number a limit will use.
The headline figure is characters with spaces, the same number a text field would report. Below it, characters without whitespace strips every space, tab and newline, which is the number most microcopy guidelines mean when they say "keep it under 40 characters". User-perceived characters counts grapheme clusters: a combining accent is one, an emoji with a skin-tone modifier is one, and a family emoji built from several code points is still one. Unicode code points counts the abstract characters the standard defines, which is what a linguist or a font engineer means by character.
The UTF-8 size row is the one people reach for last and need first. Emoji, accented letters, CJK characters and curly quotes all take more than one byte, so a 200-character string of English is far smaller than a 200-character string of emoji. If a field has a byte limit rather than a character limit, this row is the only one that predicts it.
The breakdown by category explains where the length is going. Letters, digits, punctuation and symbols are counted with Unicode property classes rather than an ASCII assumption, so accented letters count as letters and an emoji modifier counts as a symbol. Whitespace is reported separately, including the non-breaking space that sneaks in from copied web text — a frequent cause of a "200 character" caption being rejected at 201.
The "Fits in" panel checks the current count against real limits: a post, an SMS segment, a meta description, a title tag, an Instagram caption and a LinkedIn post. Each row shows used versus limit with a progress bar, and turns red with the exact number of characters over the limit. Those limits are the platforms' published caps, not estimates.
As with every tool on this site, nothing leaves the browser. There is no upload, no account and no logging, and the counts update as you type, roughly a quarter of a second after your last keystroke. Copy counts and Download counts give you a plain-text record. If you are counting words rather than characters, the {{word-count-tool|Word Count Tool}} shares this engine and reports sentences and paragraphs as well.
There is a reason a character counter earns its place next to a word count. Limits are set by different systems — a database column, a form field, a design that has to fit on one line — and each one counts a different unit, so the number that matters changes with the destination. The Fits in panel turns that into a checklist: paste a caption once and every limit is checked at the same time. If you need to count characters for a manuscript rather than a form field, remember that publishers mean characters with spaces, which is the headline figure. Neither number is more correct than the other; they answer different questions.
How to use Character Count Tool
- Paste or type the text into the box; the counts update as you type.
- Read the headline count (with spaces) and the without-whitespace row below it.
- Check the user-perceived characters and code points rows when the text contains emoji, accents or CJK characters.
- Check the UTF-8 size row before pasting into a field with a byte limit.
- Scan the Fits in panel: any row in red tells you how many characters over the platform limit you are.
When to use Character Count Tool vs related tools
Use the character count whenever a limit is expressed in characters rather than words: social captions, meta descriptions, title tags, SMS messages, form fields with maxlength, and database columns. When the limit is expressed in words — an abstract, an assignment, a speech — the Word Count Tool is the right starting point.
If the text mixes scripts and you are unsure whether a count is being distorted by combining marks or invisible characters, run it through the Unicode Text Normalizer first: normalising to NFC collapses accents that were stored as two code points, which can quietly change both the character count and the byte size.
Privacy & Security
This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.