Character Counter

What this tool does

Type or paste text and the tool instantly counts characters with and without spaces, words, lines, UTF-8 bytes and 200-character manuscript pages. Enter a character limit and a progress bar shows how close you are. Use it for cover letters, reports, social posts, ad copy or anything with a length limit.

How it is calculated

Each character counts as 1. Counting is done by code point, so characters such as emoji that take two internal units still count as one. 'Without spaces' removes every whitespace character (spaces, tabs, line breaks) before counting. Words are the chunks left after trimming and splitting on whitespace; lines are the pieces split on line breaks. Bytes are the UTF-8 size: a Korean syllable is 3 bytes, English letters, digits and spaces are 1 byte, and most emoji are 4 bytes. Manuscript pages divide the with-spaces count by 200 and show one decimal place. For example, 'Hello world' gives 11 characters with spaces, 10 without, 2 words, 1 line, 11 bytes and 0.1 pages.

• Type or paste into the box. The counts update as you type, with no button needed
• Read the six boxes: with spaces, without spaces, words, lines, bytes and manuscript pages
• Enter a number in the limit field and the bar fills based on the with-spaces count
• Going over the limit turns the bar and the 'current / limit' label red
• The copy button copies all your text; the clear button empties the box

Things to know

• '500 characters with spaces' and '500 without spaces' are quite different amounts. Check which one the form uses.
• The limit bar uses the with-spaces count. If your limit excludes spaces, watch the without-spaces box instead.
• In byte-limited fields Korean text hits the limit three times faster than English. Some systems count Korean as 2 bytes, so results there may differ.
• Line breaks count as characters, so splitting text into many lines raises the with-spaces count.
• Words are whitespace-separated chunks, so hyphenated terms count as one word.
• Emoji built from several joined characters, such as family emoji, look like one symbol but may count as several.
• All counting happens in your browser; your text is not saved or sent to a server.

Frequently asked questions