Character Counter
Text & writing · Done in 3 steps
- 1Paste your text
- 2
- 3
About
Count characters live and check them against X, Instagram, meta description, SMS and ad limits, with GSM vs Unicode SMS segments.
How to use it
- 1Paste or type your text into the box.
- 2Read the character, word, line and byte counts at the top.
- 3Check each platform bar: green is within the limit, amber is close and red is over.
- 4If the SMS warning appears, swap the listed characters to stay in cheaper GSM-7 encoding.
- You give
- Any text: a post, caption, meta description, SMS or ad copy
- You get
- Character counts (visible, no spaces, UTF-8 bytes, UTF-16 units), SMS segments and per-platform limit bars
- Good to know
- X/Twitter length is approximated (URLs = 23, emoji and CJK = 2), and platforms change their limits from time to time. Search engines trim titles and descriptions by pixel width, so treat 60/160 as guides. SMS maths assumes standard GSM-7/UCS-2 concatenation without national language tables.
- Privacy
- Processed on your device. Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged.
- Last tested
- 2026-10-28
FAQ
Why does one emoji make my SMS so much shorter?
Any character outside the GSM-7 alphabet (emoji, curly quotes, many accented letters) switches the whole message to Unicode, which fits 70 characters instead of 160, or 67 per part when the message is split.
Why do the character and byte counts differ?
Characters are what you see. Bytes are how much storage the text takes in UTF-8: accented letters use 2 bytes and emoji usually 4. Databases and APIs often limit bytes, not characters.
Is the X/Twitter count exact?
It follows X's published weighting (links count as 23, wide characters as 2), so it matches for nearly all posts. Rare edge cases like some emoji sequences may differ by a character or two.
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