How to use the Character Counter
- Type or paste your text — every count updates as you type.
- Check the platform limits: the bar turns red when your text is too long.
- See the SMS segment count, byte size and most frequent characters below.
What counts as a character?
A character is any single letter, digit, space, punctuation mark or symbol. This counter counts what you see: an emoji like 👍🏽 or a family emoji 👨👩👧 counts as one character, and an accented “é” is one character whether it was typed as one code point or two. That matches how people read text — and how most platforms count. “Without spaces” leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks.
Platform limits at a glance
X (Twitter) posts allow 280 characters, SEO titles show about 60 and meta descriptions about 155–160 before Google truncates them, Google Ads headlines take 30, Instagram captions 2,200 and LinkedIn posts 3,000. The bars show how much room you have left on each.
SMS: 160 or 70 characters
A text message holds 160 characters when it only uses the basic GSM-7 alphabet. One emoji or a character outside that alphabet (like “ç” in some cases, curly quotes or Chinese characters) switches the whole message to Unicode, which allows only 70. Longer messages are split into segments of 153 (GSM) or 67 (Unicode) characters — each segment is billed as one SMS. The counter shows the encoding and number of segments.
Bytes vs characters
Databases and APIs often limit bytes, not characters. In UTF-8 an English letter takes 1 byte, “é” 2 bytes, most Asian characters 3 bytes and emoji 4 bytes, so a 100-character text can be 400 bytes.
Tools that pair well with the Character Counter
- Case Converter — Paste any text and convert it between 11 letter cases — from Title Case for headlines to camelCase and snake_case for code.
- Text to Speech — Paste text and listen to it read aloud — pick a voice and language, adjust speed and pitch, and follow each word as it is spoken.
- Social Media Character Counter — Write once and see instantly whether your post fits 14 platform limits — including X’s weighted counting for links and emoji, and where LinkedIn and Instagram cut text off behind “…see more”.
- SERP Preview — Write a title tag and meta description and see exactly where Google is likely to cut them off — measured in pixels, not just characters, on desktop and mobile.