Character Counter

The Character Counter reports characters with spaces, characters without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs, and byte count in real time as you type or paste. It's built for anyone working against a strict character limit: Twitter/X posts (280 characters), Instagram captions (2,200), LinkedIn headlines (220), Google Ads headlines (30), meta descriptions (150–160), title tags (50–60), SMS messages (160 per segment), YouTube video titles (100), YouTube descriptions (5,000), and academic essay abstracts (usually 150–300 words with a strict cap). The distinction between "with spaces" and "without spaces" matters more than most people realise. Academic word-count limits (universities, journals) usually count characters including spaces. Programming, database, and technical contexts often mean characters without spaces (VARCHAR limits, hash inputs). SMS gateways count exact bytes including whitespace and pay per segment. Twitter and most social platforms count Unicode code points, so a single emoji counts as one "character" even though it may be several bytes. Byte count matters for anything transmitted over a network or stored in a fixed-length database column. A plain ASCII "hello" is 5 characters and 5 bytes. A Chinese greeting "你好" is 2 characters but 6 bytes in UTF-8. Emoji like 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 can be 1 "character" visually but 25+ bytes because they're composed of multiple code points with zero-width joiners. If you're writing anything for embedded systems, SMS, or fixed-column databases, always check byte count, not character count. Common use cases beyond social media: filling in comment sections with strict limits, drafting form field values (product SKUs, usernames), writing meta descriptions where Google measures characters (approximately), preparing subtitle files with per-line character caps (typically 42 for closed captions), and hitting strict resume or CV bullet-point limits. For developers, the byte count doubles as a rough size check when copy-pasting into fixed-length database fields. The tool also shows the counts for the selected text if you highlight a portion, which is useful when checking whether a specific paragraph fits inside a subsection limit rather than the whole document. Sentence count uses common terminators (period, exclamation, question mark). Paragraph count uses blank lines as separators. Everything runs entirely in your browser. Your text is never transmitted, saved, or logged, so it's safe for confidential drafts, client work, and pre-publication content. Combine this tool with the Word Counter for word-oriented tasks, the SEO Word Counter for content strategy, the Case Converter for formatting cleanup, and the Text Reverser for creative or debugging tasks.