Character Counter Online
Type or paste your text to count characters with and without spaces in real time. Useful for staying within Twitter’s 280-character limit, keeping SMS messages under 160 characters, and writing meta descriptions that do not get cut off in search results. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Related text analysis tools
What counts as a character
Every keystroke is a character. Letters, numbers, punctuation, and symbols each count as one. Spaces count as characters too, which is why this tool shows two separate counts: one that includes spaces and one that does not. The with-spaces count is what most platforms use for their limits. The without-spaces count is used in translation pricing, some academic systems, and typesetting work where spatial layout matters more than raw length.
Line breaks count as characters. Every time you press Enter, an invisible newline character is inserted into your text. On most platforms this counts toward the character limit. If your count seems higher than expected, check whether your text has line breaks that the platform counts but you cannot easily see.
Emoji are where character counting gets complicated. A single emoji typically occupies two characters in UTF-16 encoding, which is what most platforms use internally. Twitter counts every emoji as exactly two characters regardless of how many it appears to take up visually. SMS changes behavior entirely when emoji appear: a standard SMS uses 7-bit GSM encoding and fits 160 characters per message. The moment you add one emoji or any non-GSM character, the entire message switches to UTF-16 encoding and the limit drops to 70 characters per segment. A 130-character SMS with one emoji becomes a two-part message.
Key character limits by platform
Search and SEO
Google truncates title tags at approximately 60 characters and meta descriptions at approximately 158 characters in desktop search results. These are pixel-width limits rather than hard character counts, so wider characters like W and M consume more space than narrow ones like i and l. Using 60 and 158 as character targets gives you a reliable safe zone for most text.
Google Ads headlines cap at 30 characters. Descriptions cap at 90 characters. Both are hard limits that the platform enforces on submission.
Social media
Twitter and X cap posts at 280 characters for standard users. Each URL in a tweet is shortened to 23 characters regardless of the original URL length, and emoji count as 2 characters each. Instagram captions display the first 125 characters before a “more” truncation, with a hard cap of 2,200 characters. Instagram bios are limited to 150 characters. LinkedIn headlines cap at 220 characters and LinkedIn posts at 3,000 characters. TikTok captions allow up to 2,200 characters.
Facebook has a 63,206-character limit on posts, which is high enough that it is rarely a practical concern, but Facebook ads and page descriptions have much tighter limits that vary by ad format.
SMS and push notifications
Standard SMS messages allow 160 characters using GSM-7 encoding, which covers basic Latin characters and common symbols. That limit drops to 70 characters per segment when the message contains any character outside the GSM-7 set, including emoji, accented letters, or characters from non-Latin scripts. Multi-segment messages are delivered as separate texts that the receiving device reassembles, but carriers charge per segment and some older devices display them separately.
Push notifications vary significantly by operating system and device. iOS displays approximately 110 characters on a locked screen before truncation. Android shows around 40 characters in the notification shade before cutting off. Both platforms show more when the notification is expanded, but the first line is what determines whether users tap. For a per-platform visual breakdown of where text gets cut off, the social media character limit checker shows the remaining budget for each platform as you type.
Characters with spaces vs without spaces
Most online platforms and character limits count spaces as characters. Twitter, Instagram, SMS, Google Ads, and LinkedIn all count spaces. Use the with-spaces count for any platform limit check.
Characters without spaces matters in specific professional contexts. Translation agencies often price work per character excluding spaces, since the translator’s effort scales with the number of characters they need to process rather than the whitespace between them. Some academic style guides specify character limits excluding spaces. Typesetting and print design sometimes price per character without spaces for the same reason as translation.
For a broader view of your text including word count, reading time, and keyword usage, the word counter shows all those stats alongside the character counts in one panel.