Character Counter
How to Use
Type or paste text into the textarea to see real-time counts for characters, words, lines, and UTF-8 byte size. All counts update instantly as you type.
What Is Counted
- Characters: total number of characters including spaces and newlines
- Characters (no spaces): characters excluding all whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines)
- Words: number of words separated by whitespace (English and space-delimited languages)
- Lines: number of lines (counts line breaks)
- Bytes (UTF-8): size in bytes when encoded as UTF-8 — ASCII characters are 1 byte, most CJK characters are 3 bytes, and emoji are 4 bytes
Use Cases
- X (Twitter) posts: the 280-character limit counts every character equally — check your length before posting
- SEO meta descriptions: Google typically displays 120-160 characters — optimize your description length here
- SMS messages: a single SMS holds 160 ASCII characters (70 for CJK) — longer messages are split into multiple parts
- Database column validation: verify that input data fits within VARCHAR(255) or other column size constraints
Characters vs Bytes
Character count and byte size are different concepts. In UTF-8, ASCII characters (A-Z, 0-9) are 1 byte each, but Japanese hiragana/katakana/kanji are 3 bytes each, and emoji are 4 bytes each. For example, 'Hello' is 5 characters and 5 bytes, while its Japanese equivalent is 5 characters but 15 bytes. Byte size matters for database column limits and API payload restrictions, so always check both character count and byte size when working with multilingual text.
Privacy
All text processing happens entirely in your browser. Your text is never sent to a server, stored, or logged. You can safely paste sensitive content.
FAQ
What is the difference between character count and byte size?
Character count is the number of characters, while byte size is the length when encoded as UTF-8. ASCII characters are 1 byte each, but Japanese characters are 3 bytes and emoji are 4 bytes.
Is it safe to paste sensitive text?
Yes. All processing happens entirely in your browser, and the text you enter is never sent to, stored on, or logged by any server.
What does 'characters (no spaces)' exclude?
It excludes all whitespace — spaces, tabs, and newlines. This is handy when you want the pure character count for things like post or form limits.
How are emoji and combining characters counted?
Counting is based on code points, so some emoji and combining characters made up of multiple code points may be counted as two or more characters.
How is the word count determined?
It counts groups separated by whitespace as words, which works well for English and other space-delimited languages but is less accurate for languages like Japanese that don't separate words with spaces.