Character Counter

How the Character Counter works

Character counter: the number only matters next to a limit

A character count is only useful next to a limit, and the limits do not all count the same way. The single number at the top of this page is characters as a person would count them, spaces included. What each platform below it does with that number is where it gets interesting.

SMS character counter: messages are billed in segments, not characters

A text message carries 160 characters — but only if every character is in the GSM 03.38 alphabet, which is roughly the Latin letters, digits, common punctuation and a short list of European accented characters. A handful of symbols — ^ { } \ [ ~ ] | and the euro sign — are in the extension table and cost two characters each rather than one. The moment you use anything outside that set, including a curly apostrophe pasted from Word, an em dash, or a single emoji, the whole message switches to UCS-2 encoding and the limit drops from 160 to 70. Not the offending character — the whole message. This is the single most expensive mistake in bulk SMS, and it is almost always a smart quote that a word processor inserted without asking.

Longer messages are split and reassembled by the handset. Splitting costs header space, so concatenated parts hold 153 characters each on GSM-7 and 67 on UCS-2, not the full 160 or 70. A 161-character message is therefore billed as two segments carrying 153 and 8. The counter above shows the encoding it detected, the number of segments, and how much room is left in the current one.

Title tag and meta description length checker: SERP pixel width, not characters

Google shows roughly 580 pixels of a title and 920 pixels of a description on desktop, and a line of capitals or wide letters runs out sooner than a line of narrow ones. The counter measures your text in the same font family and size Google renders — 20px for the title, 14px for the description — and reports the width next to the character figure, so WWW and iii are told apart rather than both counting as three. The 60 and 155 character figures are the practical conventions; there is no hard limit, and nothing breaks if you exceed it. The text simply gets cut with an ellipsis, so put the point at the front.

How many characters in a tweet or an Instagram caption: code units, not glyphs

X allows 280 characters but weights most Latin text at 1 and CJK characters at 2, so a Japanese post runs out at about 140. Emoji count as a single character on X and as two on many other platforms, because a naive length check in JavaScript measures UTF-16 code units and most emoji occupy two of them. This counter measures whole characters, so an emoji counts once. Where a platform disagrees, it will report more than this page does, never fewer — so a draft that fits here is safe everywhere.

Character limits by platform

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