Character Counter
Count characters the way people see them, plus the technical counts that forms, databases and text messages use. Emoji and accented letters are counted correctly.
Why there is more than one character count
What looks like one character on screen can be stored as several pieces inside a computer. This counter therefore shows three measures:
| Count | What it measures | Where it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Characters | Characters as a person sees them (Unicode grapheme clusters). An emoji such as a family or a flag counts as 1. | Most everyday limits, proofreading |
| UTF-16 length | The code units JavaScript and many web forms count. Most emoji count as 2 or more. | Web forms and apps whose limit disagrees with the visible count |
| UTF-8 bytes | Storage size in the most common text encoding. English letters are 1 byte, accented letters 2, most emoji 4. | Databases, file sizes, technical limits in bytes |
Example: the text “Café 😀” has 6 characters, a UTF-16 length of 7 (the emoji uses two code units) and a size of 10 UTF-8 bytes (C, a, f = 1 byte each, é = 2, the space = 1, the emoji = 4).
Text message (SMS) length
A standard SMS carries 160 characters when every character is in the GSM 7-bit alphabet (basic Latin letters, digits, common punctuation and some accented letters). If the message contains any other character, such as most emoji, curly quotes, or letters outside that alphabet, the whole message is sent in UCS-2 encoding, and the limit falls to 70 characters.
Longer messages are split into segments that are joined back together on the phone. Each segment then carries a little less, because some space is needed to reassemble them:
| Encoding | Single message | Each segment of a long message |
|---|---|---|
| GSM 7-bit | 160 characters | 153 characters |
| UCS-2 (Unicode) | 70 characters | 67 characters |
A few GSM characters (such as €, [ ], { }, ^ and ~) take the space of two. Carriers and messaging apps can behave differently (many phones switch to internet messaging such as RCS or iMessage), so treat the segment count as a guide to standard SMS.
Common questions
Do spaces and line breaks count?
Yes, in the main count, because they take up space in a limit. “Characters without spaces” leaves out all whitespace, including line breaks and tabs.
Is my text uploaded?
No. Everything is counted in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.