Character counter with and without spaces

Yes — a space is a character, and so is a tab. That is why this page keeps two totals side by side: one counts every space between your words, the other strips them out. The gap between them is larger than most people expect, because ordinary English runs about one space every six characters, so a form that allows 4,000 characters including spaces holds only around 3,320 characters of actual writing. Two spaces after a period count twice, and a space left dangling at the end of a line counts too, which is where inexplicable one- and two-character overruns almost always come from.

Yes, every line break counts as one character here and against nearly every limit you will meet. Leaving a blank line between paragraphs therefore costs two characters rather than none, so a fifteen-paragraph statement spaced that way spends about 28 characters on gaps alone. It is the cheapest thing to reclaim when you are three characters over: single-spacing the paragraphs usually gets you there without touching a word.

To your eye yes, but to almost everything that enforces a limit an emoji is two characters or more. A thumbs-up is one mark on screen and fills two of the slots a web form measures; add a skin tone and it fills four while still looking like one mark. The family emoji is the extreme case — a single picture, built out of seven separate pieces, filling eleven slots. X ignores all of that and charges a flat two characters for any emoji however it is assembled. The three-figure panel below the counter exists for exactly this: it shows you which of the numbers a given limit is likely to be reading.

Because Word leaves out the paragraph mark at the end of every paragraph, while this page counts each line break you typed. A twelve-paragraph document therefore reads about eleven characters shorter in Word than it does here, and the gap grows with every extra paragraph. Word's second figure, Characters (no spaces), still includes digits and punctuation exactly as ours does, so once you compare like with like the two agree on ordinary prose. The rest of any remaining difference is usually selection: Word measures whatever is highlighted when you open the Word Count box, and counts text boxes and footnotes only if you tell it to.

280 characters on a standard account, and a link always costs 23 of them however long the address is. X also weighs characters unevenly: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hindi and Thai count one each, while Chinese, Japanese, Korean and emoji count two, so a 200-character post in Japanese is already over the line. The X figure above applies the same weighting and the same flat 23 per link, which is why it is often well below the plain character total for a post full of URLs. Paid accounts can go up to 25,000 characters, but only the opening 280 show in the timeline before the post folds behind Show more.

Because one character in it fell outside the 128-character alphabet phones use for plain messages, and that drops the ceiling from 160 characters to 70. The usual culprit is invisible to the naked eye: the curved apostrophe that Word and Google Docs substitute automatically for a straight one. A 160-character message that fitted in a single send becomes three parts the moment that apostrophe appears, because long messages are then chopped into 67-character pieces. Em dashes, curly quotes and any emoji do the same thing, and the counter names the exact characters responsible so you can swap them for plain ones.

About 155 characters is the safe ceiling on desktop and roughly 120 on a phone. Google does not truncate at a character count at all — it truncates at a width of about 920 pixels, so a line of narrow letters survives further than one packed with capitals and Ws, and 155 is simply the character figure that stays inside that width in normal sentence case. Page titles are tighter at around 60 characters. Neither is a rule you can break loudly: going over costs you the tail of the sentence, not the listing, so put the point at the front.