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Character Counter — free, and it runs in your browser

Count characters and bytes against social and SEO length limits.

  • Count characters with and without spaces, plus the real byte length.
  • Live progress against the limits that matter — meta descriptions, post lengths, SMS.
  • Emoji and accented characters are counted correctly, which is where naive counters fail.
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  • 70 tools

    Free, with no account and no watermark

  • 0 bytes

    Of your files or text uploaded — this tool runs in the tab

  • No queue

    The work happens in this tab, not in a line behind other users

Three steps, nothing to install

Character Counter in three steps

  1. TEXT123456Paste it in — it never leaves the tab

    Paste your text

    Drop in the headline, description or post you are writing to a limit.

  2. TEXTEvery field, broken out and checked

    Watch it against the limit

    Characters, characters without spaces and UTF-8 bytes are all shown, with the common platform limits marked so you can see how close you are.

  3. Copy COUNTS

    Trim and take it

    Edit until it fits, then copy the finished text straight out.

Why use Character Counter

  • Characters and bytes are different

    An emoji is one character and four bytes; an accented letter can be one or two. Both counts are shown, because a database column and a tweet are measuring different things.

  • Exact, not approximate

    The numbers on screen are measured from your actual input rather than estimated, so you can act on them without checking elsewhere.

  • Your text stays in the page

    What you paste is not transmitted or stored, so an API response full of customer records, a token or an internal query never leaves your machine.

Frequently asked questions

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.

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.

Often used alongside

Related guides

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