How to use it
- Type in the box or paste text from anywhere.
- Read the counts of characters, characters without spaces, words, lines and bytes below the box.
- To check a length limit, pick a preset such as “Meta description” or “SMS”, or choose “Custom limit” and enter a number.
- The message under the box tells you how many characters are left, or how many you need to remove.
How it works
Characters are counted the way people see them (grapheme clusters). An accented letter such as “é”, a flag or an emoji with a skin tone counts as one character, even though it is stored as several code points. “Characters without spaces” removes every whitespace character, including tabs and line breaks. Bytes are the size of the text encoded as UTF-8, the encoding used by web pages and most databases: plain English letters take 1 byte, most accented Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Hebrew letters take 2, most Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters take 3, and emoji usually take 4.
The limit presets are common guidelines, not official limits. Search engines do not cut titles and descriptions at a fixed number of characters; they truncate by pixel width, so about 60 characters for a title and about 155 for a description is a practical target rather than a rule.
The SMS preset follows the GSM 03.38 rules used by mobile networks. If every character is in the GSM-7 alphabet, one message holds 160 characters, and characters from the extension table (€ [ ] { } ~ ^ | \) take two places each. A single character outside that alphabet, such as “ş”, “ć” or an emoji, switches the whole message to Unicode (UCS-2) and the limit drops to 70. Longer texts are sent as linked parts of 153 (GSM-7) or 67 (Unicode) characters; the part count shown is an estimate, because some phones and gateways handle the boundaries differently.
The X/Twitter preset counts characters plainly. X itself counts every link as 23 characters regardless of its length, and counts Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters and most emoji as two, so its own counter can disagree with this one.
Examples
Writing a meta description
Choose “Meta description (~155)” and paste your draft. If it shows “12 characters over the limit of 155”, shorten the sentence so the important part is not cut off in search results.
Keeping an SMS to one part
A 150-character reminder in plain English fits in one SMS, and adding “Ödeme” keeps it there because “Ö” is in the GSM-7 alphabet. Adding “Teşekkürler” switches the whole message to Unicode because “ş” is not, so the limit becomes 70 and the same text needs three parts.
Checking a database column
A VARCHAR column limited to 255 bytes in UTF-8 cannot always hold 255 characters. Compare the “Bytes (UTF-8)” count with the column size before you import names that contain accents or Asian scripts.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces count as characters?
Yes. The main “Characters” count includes spaces, tabs and line breaks, as most forms and platforms do. The “Characters without spaces” count leaves all whitespace out.
Why does an emoji count as one character here but more elsewhere?
This counter counts what you see on screen. Many programs count UTF-16 code units instead, where most emoji are 2 and a family or flag emoji can be 7 or more. X counts most emoji as 2 characters.
Is 60 characters the official limit for a page title?
No. Google and other search engines do not publish a character limit; they shorten titles that are too wide for the result layout. Around 50–60 characters usually displays in full on desktop, which is why the preset uses 60.
Why did my SMS limit drop from 160 to 70?
Your text contains at least one character that is not in the GSM-7 alphabet, such as an emoji, a curly quote or a letter like “ş” or “ł”. The message must then be sent as Unicode, which allows 70 characters per single SMS.
Will my count match the one on X/Twitter exactly?
Not always. X counts each link as 23 characters, and counts Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters and most emoji as 2. For plain Latin text without links the counts match.
Privacy
The text is counted only in your browser. It is not uploaded, stored or included in analytics.