Character Counter
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What Your Result Means
- Characters (with spaces): The total number of characters in your text, including spaces, punctuation, and line breaks. This is the count most social media platforms use for their limits.
- Characters (no spaces): Same count but excluding all whitespace. Useful for academic word-processing limits or translation cost estimates that charge per character without spaces.
- Words: The number of whitespace-separated tokens. Useful for blog post length targets, essay limits, or estimating reading time (average reader: ~250 words per minute).
- Platform Bars: Progress bars showing how much of each platform's limit you have used. When the bar turns red, you have exceeded the limit.
How This Calculator Works
You type or paste text into the box. The tool counts characters (with and without spaces), words (split on whitespace), and lines (split on newlines) in real time. It then compares the character count to the published limits for Twitter/X (280), Instagram (2,200), SMS (160), and LinkedIn (3,000). All processing runs locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Quick Questions
Does Twitter count URLs as full length?
No. Twitter/X wraps all URLs to a fixed 23-character t.co link regardless of the actual URL length. This tool counts the raw characters, so your actual Twitter limit may be slightly more generous if your text contains links.
What is the Instagram caption limit?
Instagram allows up to 2,200 characters per caption, though only the first 125 characters appear before the "more" truncation. Hashtags count toward the limit, and you can use up to 30 hashtags per post.
Why is the SMS limit 160 characters?
The 160-character limit comes from the GSM-7 encoding standard, which fits 160 7-bit characters into a single 140-byte SMS segment. Messages with special characters (emoji, non-Latin scripts) use UCS-2 encoding, which reduces the limit to 70 characters per segment.
Is my text stored or sent anywhere?
No. All counting happens entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Your text is never transmitted to any server. You can verify this by checking the network tab in your browser's developer tools.
Sources
- X (Twitter) Developer Docs — Counting Characters (tweet length rules and URL wrapping)
- Wikipedia — SMS Message Size (GSM-7 encoding and 160-character segment standard)
Method & review
Estimate only. Results reflect your inputs and standard formulas. Double-check important decisions independently.