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ToolBoxGenie

Character Counter

Text Tools ยท Added 8 July 2026

A precise character count matters whenever a field has a hard ceiling. This tool counts with and without spaces, tracks your text against the limits people most often need, and shows how many SMS segments a message would cost.

Counts

Characters
0

Including spaces

Without spaces
0
Words
0
Letters
0
Digits
0
Spaces
0
UTF-8 bytes
0

What a byte-limited field counts

UTF-16 code units
0

What String.length reports

SMS segments
0

GSM-7 ยท 160 chars per segment

SEO title0 / 60

Google truncates by pixel width โ€” 60 is a safe guide

Meta description0 / 160

Longer descriptions get cut in the snippet

Post on X0 / 280

Standard account limit

SMS (single)0 / 160

GSM-7 encoding, one segment

Characters are counted by grapheme, so a multi-code-point emoji counts as one. Systems that bill by UTF-16 code unit or UTF-8 byte will see the larger figures above.

How to use the character counter

  1. 1Paste or type your text.
  2. 2Read the character totals with and without spaces.
  3. 3Watch the limit bars for SEO titles, meta descriptions, tweets and SMS.
  4. 4A bar turns red once you pass its limit.

Examples

An SEO title

Input
"Free Online Word Counter โ€” Live Counts and Reading Time"
Result
55 characters โ€” within the ~60 character display limit

An SMS

Input
A 172-character message
Result
2 SMS segments (GSM-7 encoding switches to 153 characters per segment after the first)

About the character counter

Characters are not bytes

In ASCII the two are the same, which is why the distinction is easy to forget. In UTF-8, an accented Latin letter takes two bytes, most CJK characters take three, and many emoji take four. A database column declared as VARCHAR(255) may be counting bytes, characters or code points depending on the engine.

If you are validating input against a limit, be explicit about which unit you mean. A form that accepts 100 characters of English but rejects 60 characters of Japanese is almost always counting the wrong thing.

Writing to a hard limit

Short fields reward ruthless editing. Cut articles, drop qualifiers, replace phrases with single words. 'In order to' becomes 'to'; 'a number of' becomes 'several' or a real figure.

Put the important information first. Every one of these fields truncates from the end, so a title that front-loads its subject still communicates when it is cut off mid-word.

Frequently asked questions

Do emoji count as one character?
Visually yes, technically often no. This tool counts by grapheme where the browser supports it, so a family emoji built from several code points counts as one. Systems that count raw UTF-16 units may charge you four or more for the same emoji โ€” SMS gateways in particular.
Why does an SMS get shorter after the first segment?
Multi-part messages reserve a few bytes in each segment for reassembly headers. A single GSM-7 message holds 160 characters, but each part of a concatenated message holds only 153. Any non-GSM character, including a curly quote, drops the whole message to 70 characters per segment.
What is the real limit on an SEO title?
Google truncates by pixel width, not character count, so there is no exact number. Around 60 characters is a safe working limit for most fonts; wide capital letters can be cut sooner.

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