Count characters with and without spaces, against platform limits.
Count characters with and without spaces, and track your text against the limits that actually get enforced — meta descriptions, SMS messages, social posts and alt text.
Everything you enter stays in this browser tab. Nothing is sent to our servers, logged or stored.
This is one of the thingsText Counterdoes — open it for everything else it supports.
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What Text Counter supports
Word countLive count as you type
Character countWith and without spaces
Sentences & paragraphs
Line count
Reading & speaking time
Platform limitsSEO, SMS and social caps
Word frequency
About Character Counter
Character limits are everywhere and each platform counts slightly differently. A meta description gets truncated in search results, an SMS splits into two billable messages at a specific length, and social platforms cut posts off mid-sentence without warning.
This shows characters with spaces, without spaces, letters only and digits, plus a live progress bar against whichever limit you are writing for. Characters are counted as grapheme clusters, so an emoji counts as one — which is how people count, though not how every system does.
How to count characters
1
Enter your text
Type or paste into the box. Counts update immediately.
2
Pick a limit
Choose the platform or field you are writing for to get a live progress bar.
3
Trim to fit
Edit until you are inside the limit. The indicator turns amber near it and red past it.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces count as characters?
In almost every system that enforces a limit, yes — including social platforms, SMS and search engines. Both figures are shown so you can use whichever your target requires.
Why does my SMS split into several messages?
A single SMS holds 160 GSM-7 characters. Adding any character outside that set — an emoji, an accented letter, a curly quote — switches the whole message to UCS-2, which allows only 70 characters per message.
How are emoji counted?
As one character each. Some systems disagree: SMS counts most emoji as two units, and APIs that count UTF-16 code units treat certain emoji as two or more.
Is my text stored?
No. Counting is entirely local to your browser, and nothing is transmitted or saved at any point.