Character Counter

The Character Counter shows live counts of characters, UTF-8 bytes, words, and lines as you type, and checks your text against common limits. It is for social media managers, students, and anyone writing to a strict character budget.

Many fields enforce a hard character cap, and guessing wastes time. Counting live in the browser shows exactly where you stand, and your text is never uploaded.

1. Type directly in the box, or paste existing text.
2. Watch the character, byte, word, and line counts update with every keystroke.
3. Check the count against the limit you are writing for.
4. Trim or expand until you are within budget.
5. Copy the finished text back out.

• Live character, byte, word, and line counts
• UTF-8 byte count for encoding-sensitive limits
• Quick checks against common limits
• Counts entirely in the browser

• Fitting a post within a platform’s character cap
• Writing meta titles and descriptions to length
• Checking SMS message length where bytes matter
• Keeping form fields within a maximum

• Use the byte count for systems that measure bytes, since accented and emoji characters take more than one.
• Leave a small buffer below a hard limit in case a platform appends anything.
• Paste as plain text if counts look off; hidden formatting can add invisible characters.

• Counting characters when a field actually limits bytes — the byte count here catches multi-byte characters that take more space.
• Forgetting that spaces and emoji count too; the live total includes them.
• Assuming every platform counts a link at its full length when some shorten it.