Text Tools
Measure characters, letters, digits, spaces, words and lines while you type.
Live result
Simple workflow
How to use Character Counter
- 1Enter the text you want to measure.
- 2Review character and content counts live.
- 3Copy or clear the text when finished.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
What does the Characters number measure?
It counts Unicode code points. A displayed grapheme can contain multiple code points, while a supplementary emoji can occupy two UTF-16 code units but still count as one code point.
Does Character Counter send my writing anywhere?
No. The browser calculates code-point, letter, digit, whitespace, word and line totals from the text in this tab without uploading or storing the input.
Practical guide
Know which kind of character limit you are measuring
Character Counter reports Unicode code points for Characters and for Without spaces. It also counts Unicode letters, Unicode digits, whitespace code points and lines. The values update in the current browser tab as you type.
A code point is a precise text-encoding unit, but it is not always the same as a user-perceived character, a JavaScript string length or a stored byte. Check the destination's definition before using the result for a database, API, SMS or platform limit.
Worked example
Count an accent and an emoji
- Start with
- Enter e followed by a combining acute accent, then π: eΜπ.
- Choose
- Read the Characters value and compare it with the technical units below.
- You get
- This tool reports 3 code points: e, the combining mark and the emoji. A grapheme-aware interface may show 2 user-perceived characters; JavaScript length is 4 UTF-16 code units; UTF-8 storage uses 7 bytes.
Tips for a useful result
- Characters without spaces removes every value matched by the browser's JavaScript whitespace pattern, including line breaks; it does not remove punctuation.
- Use Word Counter when the writing unit is a word, sentence or reading-time estimate rather than an encoding unit.
- Counting is computed from the text already in this tab. The text is not uploaded, stored by UtilSprout or included in analytics.
Graphemes, code points, code units and bytes
A grapheme cluster approximates one symbol a reader perceives, such as a base letter plus combining marks or an emoji sequence joined into one displayed glyph. Unicode Standard Annex #29 defines default grapheme-cluster boundaries; this tool does not run that segmentation algorithm.
A Unicode code point identifies one encoded character value. The Characters metric iterates the input by code point, so a supplementary emoji counts once while a separate combining mark also counts once.
A UTF-16 code unit is the unit used by JavaScript's string length. Code points outside the Basic Multilingual Plane use two UTF-16 code units. UTF-8 bytes describe storage or transmission size and vary by code point, so a 280-code-point string is not necessarily 280 bytes.
Choose the metric required by the destination
Social fields and editors may describe grapheme clusters as characters, programming APIs may limit UTF-16 units, and databases or network protocols may impose byte limits. Use this page's Characters result only when a code-point count matches the rule you need. The tool performs no Unicode normalization, so canonically equivalent spellings can have different code-point totals.
Authoritative external sources
- Unicode Standard Annex #29: Unicode Text Segmentation (external)
The Unicode Consortium's specification for grapheme-cluster, word and sentence boundaries.
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