Character Counter

A character is any single symbol: a letter, a digit, a punctuation mark, a space, a line break or an emoji. A letter is only the alphabetic subset. So "Hello!" has 5 letters but 6 characters.

Most limits, including those on X, Instagram and Google, count characters with spaces. Some academic and translation briefs ask for characters without spaces, which is why this tool shows both. The secondary statistics also break your text down into letters, numbers, punctuation and spaces.

Platforms change their limits from time to time, so check the platform's own help pages for anything critical. For search snippets, use the Title Tag Checker and Meta Description Checker, which measure pixel width as well as length. For every major social network in one place, try the Social Media Character Counter.

Computers store text as code points, and many symbols people see as one character are made of several. A family emoji is seven code points joined together; a waving hand with a skin tone is two. A simple string.length check in JavaScript counts code units, so it reports 7 for "Hi 👋🏽" and 11 for a family emoji.

This counter uses grapheme segmentation (Intl.Segmenter), which groups code points into what a reader perceives as one character. That matches how most modern apps display text. Be aware that a few platforms still count the raw length, and that X gives emoji a weight of two characters, which the Twitter Character Counter accounts for.

• Writing social posts, ad headlines and push notifications that must fit a fixed space.
• Filling in application forms and CMS fields with hard limits.
• Drafting SMS campaigns, where going one character over can double the cost.
• Writing SEO titles and descriptions that should not be cut off in search results.
• Checking translated text, where character counts are often used for pricing.