Character Counter

What this tool does

A character counter answers “how long is this string” when the limit is characters, not words. This character counter shows Unicode characters, characters excluding whitespace, JavaScript string length, and UTF-8 bytes. You can type an optional limit and read how many Unicode characters remain. Counts update as you type. Nothing is uploaded.

Those lengths are not the same number. “café” is four Unicode characters and five UTF-8 bytes because é is two bytes. An emoji is often one visible glyph, two UTF-16 code units, and four UTF-8 bytes. A tool that prints one unlabeled “characters” figure hides that difference until a form rejects the submit.

Use this page for SMS-ish limits, meta descriptions, filenames, and any box that says “N characters.” Use the Word Counter when the limit is words, sentences, or paragraphs. This page will not invent a word count. That split keeps the labels honest.

How to use

1. Paste or type the text. The four length rows update immediately.
2. Optionally enter a whole-number limit. Remaining is limit minus Unicode characters. Over-limit shows as a negative remaining and a status line.
3. Example loads “Hello 👋 café” with a limit of 10. Clear empties both fields.

The remaining row is a dash when no limit is set. A non-numeric limit is an error and does not change the length rows. Pasted HTML is counted, not executed.

Example

Example text Hello 👋 café is 12 Unicode characters (including the space), 10 if you drop whitespace, 13 JavaScript string units because the emoji uses a surrogate pair, and 16 UTF-8 bytes. With limit 10, remaining is −2. That is the point of showing four numbers instead of one.

Hello 👋 café
Unicode 12 · no whitespace 11 · JS length 13 · UTF-8 16

Limits

• Unicode characters are code points from Array.from. Combined emoji sequences (skin tone, ZWJ families) can still be several code points that look like one glyph. This page does not do grapheme clustering.
• JavaScript string length is UTF-16 code units. It matches string.length in the browser. Older “Twitter 140” talk often meant this, not code points.
• Characters excluding whitespace drop spaces, tabs, and line breaks. They do not drop punctuation.
• UTF-8 bytes use TextEncoder. That is the usual on-the-wire size, not a database CHAR column.
• The optional limit is compared to Unicode characters only. If your system counts bytes or UTF-16 units, read the matching row and do the subtraction yourself.
• Input over 200,000 characters is refused.

This is not a tweet composer, an SMS encoder, or a UCS-2 billing calculator. Those products weight characters by vendor rules this page does not implement. If a CMS says “255 characters” and then stores UTF-8 in a 255-byte column, the byte row is the one that will fail first.

For words and sentences, go back to the Word Counter. To shorten the string, the Whitespace Cleaner can collapse repeated spaces before you count again.

Privacy is the same as the other text tools. The string you type is processed in this tab. A refresh or a closed window drops it. That is not a promise that a screenshot never existed; it is a promise that this page does not send the field to YallaSolve for counting.

When you write the number down, write which row you used. “12 Unicode characters” and “16 UTF-8 bytes” are different claims about the same paste. A ticket that says only “12 characters” will be reopened the first time an emoji lands in the field.