Character and Byte Counter

How to use it

1. Paste or type the text into Text. The counts update as you type.
2. Read Characters (graphemes) for the length a reader sees, and Code points for the Unicode count.
3. Read UTF-8 bytes for the size of a web page or a file in the usual encoding.
4. In Limits, check the SMS and X rows: Left is the room in the last part or post.

Characters, code points and graphemes

A code point is one number in the Unicode table. A character as a reader sees it is a grapheme cluster, and one grapheme can hold several code points: an e with a combining accent is two code points and one grapheme, and a family emoji joined by zero-width joiners is five code points and one grapheme.

The grapheme count uses the browser's segmenter, which follows the Unicode rules for grapheme clusters (UAX #29). Two of them: no break is made before an extending character or a zero-width joiner, and an emoji sequence or a pair of regional indicators stays together.

Bytes in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32

• UTF-8 uses 1 byte up to U+007F, 2 bytes up to U+07FF, 3 bytes up to U+FFFF and 4 bytes above that.
• UTF-16 uses one 16-bit unit for most code points. A code point above U+FFFF takes two units, a surrogate pair, which is 4 bytes.
• UTF-32 uses exactly 4 bytes for every code point.

SMS limits

A message written only with the GSM 7-bit characters fits 160 characters in one SMS. When it is longer, each part holds 153 characters, because part of the 140-byte payload is used for the header. The characters of the extension table (form feed, ^ { } \ [ ~ ] | and the euro sign) take two positions each.

A message with any character outside GSM-7 is sent in UCS-2, which holds 70 characters in one SMS and 67 in each part of a longer one. This tool counts ş, ğ, ı, İ, ç and Ç as outside GSM-7, which is the stricter count for Turkish text.

• The GSM-7 table and the extension table come from Wikipedia's GSM 03.38 article; the standard itself is 3GPP TS 23.038, Alphabets and language-specific information.
• The 153 and 67 figures are given on Wikipedia's SMS article, which cites the 3GPP standard for the 160 and 70 figures.

X post length

X counts a post out of 280 weighted characters. Most characters weigh 1; emoji and CJK characters weigh 2. A link counts 23, whatever its length. The weight ranges are the ones in X's twitter-text configuration (version 3); X's counting page gives the same rules in words.

The tool finds links that start with http:// or https://. A link written without the scheme is counted as ordinary text, so a post with one may be counted longer than X counts it.

Frequently asked questions