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Character Counter

Count characters and bytes against social and SEO length limits.

Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded

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Characters
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No whitespace
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Whitespace
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Lines
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UTF-8 bytes
1 line

Frequently asked questions

Why is the byte count higher than the character count?

Text is stored as UTF-8, where a plain ASCII letter takes one byte but an accented letter takes two, most symbols take three, and emoji take four. A 10-character string containing an emoji is 13 bytes.

Which number does a database column limit use?

It depends. PostgreSQL varchar(n) and SQL Server nvarchar(n) count characters; MySQL varchar(n) counts characters but the row size limit counts bytes. When in doubt, size against the byte count.

Is an emoji one character?

Here, yes — this counts what a reader would call a character. Some emoji are built from several code points joined together (a flag, or a person with a skin-tone modifier); those still count as one.

Characters, code points and bytes

These three counts are different, and mixing them up is the usual cause of a “value too long” error on input that looked short enough. A character is what a reader perceives. A code point is a Unicode entry. A byte is storage.

The emoji 👍 is one character, one code point, and four bytes. The flag 🇯🇵 is one character but two code points and eight bytes. An accented é may be one code point or two depending on how the text was normalised, but it is one character either way.

Where each count matters

  • Characters — form validation, SEO title and description limits, anything a person is reading.
  • Bytes — database column sizes, SMS message segments, HTTP header limits, file sizes.

For words, sentences and reading time rather than raw length, use the word counter. To check a meta description against what Google will actually show, the meta tag generator previews it.

Related tools

All text utilities