Character Counter

Why character counts never quite agree

You'll notice that Twitter, Discord, Microsoft Word, and a database column with VARCHAR(160) sometimes disagree about how many characters are in the same string. That's because "a character" means different things in different systems. This counter uses string.length — the JavaScript native count — which counts UTF-16 code units. For ASCII and most Latin-script text this matches what you'd intuitively call a character. Non-BMP characters, though, get double-counted.

The emoji problem

Many emoji and symbols outside the Basic Multilingual Plane count as 2 — a surrogate pair. 😀 is one visible character but string.length === 2. Compound emoji like 👨‍👩‍👧 (family, using Zero Width Joiners) can be 5, 7, even 11 code units. Skin-tone modifiers add two each. This matches how Twitter/X, SMS, and most databases actually count — so if your limit is 280 and you see 278 here with two emoji, your tweet really is at its limit even though it looks like 30 characters.

Character limits that matter in 2026

• Twitter/X post: 280 characters (25,000 for Premium).
• Twitter/X bio: 160 characters.
• Instagram caption: 2,200 characters (only the first 125 show without "see more").
• Instagram bio: 150 characters.
• LinkedIn post: 3,000 characters (1,300 recommended).
• LinkedIn headline: 220 characters.
• SEO meta title: 50–60 characters before truncation in Google results.
• SEO meta description: 150–160 characters.
• SMS (GSM-7): 160 per segment, or 70 per segment if any character forces UCS-2 encoding (an emoji, some curly quotes, etc.).
• YouTube title: 100 characters.
• YouTube description: 5,000 characters.
• Google Ads headline: 30 characters.
• Google Ads description: 90 characters.
• GitHub commit subject: conventionally ≤ 50; hard cut at 72 before wrapping in the UI.
• Amazon product title: 200 characters.

"With spaces" vs "without spaces"

Almost every digital platform — Twitter, SMS, meta tags, URLs — counts spaces. Some academic and legal word-count guidelines historically don't, because typewriter-era manuscripts were measured on type size. If your instructor or editor doesn't specify, assume "characters including spaces."

The "curly quote" gotcha for SMS

If you paste text from Word, Pages, or macOS Notes into an SMS, your straight ' apostrophes may have been autocorrected to curly ' ones. Those aren't in the GSM-7 alphabet, so your carrier silently switches to UCS-2 encoding — which halves the per-segment limit from 160 to 70. A message that looks like one text suddenly costs three. If you send SMS marketing, paste through a plain-text editor first.