Many places you write have a hard character limit: a post on X, a text message, a YouTube title, an app-store subtitle, a meta description. This character counter shows exactly how long your text is — with and without spaces, broken down into letters, digits, spaces and symbols — and checks it against more than a dozen common limits at once.
How to use the character counter
- Type or paste your text into the box.
- Pick the limit you care about from Check against, or choose Custom limit and enter any number.
- Read the character count on the tape and the number of characters left (or over). The bar below fills up as you approach the limit.
- Scroll to the table to see how the same text fits every platform listed.
How characters are counted
- Characters count user-perceived characters, so “é” and “👍” each count as one.
- Without spaces removes spaces, tabs and line breaks.
- UTF-8 bytes is the storage size of the text in the web’s standard encoding.
- SMS segments checks whether every character belongs to the GSM-7 alphabet. If even one does not — an emoji, a curly quote, a Chinese character — the whole message uses Unicode.
Worked example
The sample announcement in the box — “Fresh sourdough is back on Saturday! Doors open at 8 a.m. and the first 20 loaves go to early birds. See you there 🍞” — has 116 characters, 93 without spaces, and 24 words. It fits an X post with 164 characters to spare (280 − 116).
It is too long for a YouTube title (100) by 16 characters. As a text message, the bread emoji forces Unicode encoding: the emoji takes two of the 70 units available, so the 117-unit message splits into 2 segments. Replace the emoji with a period and the same text fits in a single 160-character GSM-7 message.
Common character limits
| Where | Limit |
|---|---|
| X (Twitter) post, standard account | 280 |
| Bluesky post | 300 |
| Threads post | 500 |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 |
| TikTok caption | 4,000 |
| YouTube title / description | 100 / 5,000 |
| Single SMS (GSM-7 / Unicode) | 160 / 70 |
| Search result title (approx.) | 50–60 |
| Meta description (approx.) | 120–160 |
Platforms change their limits from time to time, and some only show part of a long caption before a “more” link — Instagram, for example, truncates captions in the feed after roughly the first 125 characters. Put the important words first.
Tips for writing to a limit
Front-load the message
Readers and search results often see only the beginning. Lead with the key fact, offer or keyword, and push supporting detail to the end where trimming hurts less.
Know what counts double
On X, every link counts as 23 characters regardless of its real length, and many emoji count as two. In SMS, characters such as €, [ and ] are allowed in GSM-7 but take two slots each.
Check bytes for technical fields
Database columns, push notification payloads and some APIs measure bytes. A 100-character limit in bytes holds only 25 emoji. The UTF-8 byte count on the tape shows the real storage cost.
To count words, sentences and reading time instead, use the word counter.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces count as characters?
Yes. Most platforms, including X, Instagram and LinkedIn, count every space, line break and punctuation mark toward their limit. The tape shows both the total and the count without spaces, which some school assignments ask for.
How are emoji counted?
This counter treats each emoji as one character, the way you see it. Platforms differ: X counts most emoji as two characters, and an SMS that contains any emoji switches to Unicode encoding, cutting the limit from 160 to 70 characters.
Why does my SMS split into several messages?
A single SMS holds 160 characters from the basic GSM-7 alphabet or 70 Unicode characters. Longer texts are sent in segments of 153 or 67 characters, because each segment carries a small header so phones can reassemble the message.
How long should a meta description or page title be?
Search engines truncate by display width rather than a fixed count, but titles of about 50–60 characters and descriptions of about 120–160 characters usually display in full on desktop results.
What is the difference between characters and bytes?
Characters are what you see; bytes are how the text is stored. In UTF-8, plain English letters take 1 byte each, accented letters usually 2, and emoji 4. Database fields and some APIs limit bytes, not characters.