About Character Counter
This tool gives you a live character count plus a breakdown by character type — letters, digits, punctuation, spaces — and the UTF-8 byte length. The unique feature is the live platform limits panel, which shows at a glance whether your text fits Twitter, SMS, meta tags, Instagram bios, YouTube titles, and more, with a visual progress bar for each.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What's the difference between this and a word counter?
- A word counter focuses on words, sentences, and paragraphs. A character counter focuses on raw character counts and platform limits. If you're writing for character-limited platforms (X, SMS, SEO meta tags), use this tool.
- Why is the SMS limit different (160 vs 70)?
- Standard GSM-7 encoding allows 160 characters per SMS. If your message contains any non-GSM character (emoji, Chinese, Arabic, etc.) it switches to UCS-2 Unicode, which only fits 70 characters per SMS.
- Why count UTF-8 bytes?
- Some systems (databases, APIs, file formats) have byte limits, not character limits. ASCII = 1 byte/char, but non-Latin characters take 2–4 bytes each. The byte counter helps when you're hitting a byte-limited field.
- Are my texts stored?
- No. Everything is computed in your browser. The text you type is never sent anywhere.
- Why is the X Premium limit 4000?
- X (formerly Twitter) Premium subscribers can post up to 4,000 characters in a single post. Free accounts are still capped at 280.