How to use Character Counter
- Type or paste the text.
- Watch the bars: green is within the limit, amber is close, red is over.
- Set a custom limit for your own field or API.
Character Counter features
- Characters with and without spaces, words, lines, UTF-16 units and UTF-8 bytes
- Progress bars for SMS, X/Twitter, meta title and description, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and git subjects
- Automatic GSM-7 vs Unicode SMS detection (160 vs 70 characters)
- Custom limit and choice of counting unit (visible characters, UTF-16 units or bytes)
- Live update as you type
Character Counter example
Check a tweet
Input:
Mutqan Tools: free developer & QA utilities that run in your browser 🚀Output:
72 characters · X/Twitter 72 / 280 (208 left) · SMS (Unicode) 72 / 70 (over by 2)Frequently asked questions about Character Counter
Which limits are built in?
SMS (160 GSM-7 or 70 Unicode), X/Twitter posts (280), meta title (60), meta description (160), Instagram captions (2,200), LinkedIn posts (3,000), YouTube titles (100) and git commit subjects (72), plus a custom limit you set.
Why does the SMS limit change to 70?
If the text contains any character outside the GSM-7 alphabet (for example Arabic letters or most emoji), carriers switch to UCS-2 encoding and a single segment holds only 70 characters.
How should I count characters for Twitter/X?
X counts most characters as 1 but CJK characters as 2 and URLs as 23. This tool counts visible characters; use the "UTF-16 units" mode for a stricter estimate.
Does the count include spaces and line breaks?
The main count does; a separate figure excludes all whitespace. Lines are counted by line breaks.