Text Toolkit

Character Counter

Count characters with and without spaces. Perfect for tweets, SMS, and essay limits.

0 words · 0 characters
0
Characters
0
Characters (no spaces)
0
Words
0
Sentences
0
Paragraphs
0
Syllables
—
Reading time
at 238 words/min
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Speaking time
at 150 words/min
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Avg word length
characters
—
Avg sentence length
words

About this tool

A free character counter for tweets, SMS, captions, and essay limits. The counter shows characters with and without spaces, alongside word, sentence, and paragraph counts so you can track every relevant length constraint at once.

Most platforms count differently. Twitter/X is 280 (or 4,000 for premium), Instagram bios are 150, SMS messages are 160 per segment in GSM-7 encoding. Use the Character Counter to match your text to the platform without surprise truncation.

The same shared text buffer powers every tool in Text Toolkit — paste once, then switch to the Word Counter for keyword density, the Readability Checker for grade-level analysis, or the Case Converter to reformat.

Frequently asked questions

  • What is the character limit for a tweet?
    280 characters for standard X/Twitter posts; X Premium users can post up to 4,000. URLs are auto-shortened by t.co and count as 23 characters regardless of actual length.
  • Does character count include spaces?
    It depends on the platform. Twitter, SMS, and meta descriptions count spaces. For programming or URL contexts you may want a "no spaces" count. The toolkit shows both numbers side by side.
  • What is the character limit for an Instagram caption?
    2,200 characters — but only the first ~125 are visible before the "more" link, so front-load the key content. Hashtags count toward the limit; max 30 hashtags per post.
  • How do I count characters in a text message?
    Standard SMS uses GSM-7 encoding (160 characters per segment). Messages with emoji, accented characters, or non-Latin scripts switch to UCS-2 encoding, which drops the segment limit to 70. Long messages are split and reassembled by the receiver.
  • What is the difference between characters and bytes?
    A character is a single visible unit. A byte is a unit of storage. ASCII characters are 1 byte each; emoji and non-Latin characters often use 2–4 bytes in UTF-8. Most platform limits are character-based, not byte-based.