Character Counter

X (Twitter) allows 280 characters on a standard account and up to 25,000 with Premium; any link counts as 23 characters no matter how long the URL actually is, because X shortens it. Instagram captions allow 2,200 characters but only show about 125 before the 'more' cut-off. LinkedIn posts allow 3,000 characters and truncate at roughly 210 in the feed. Facebook posts allow 63,206 characters but truncate at about 480. Threads allows 500 and Bluesky 300. In practice the useful limit is the truncation point, not the hard limit — write the first 125 characters as if they were the whole post.

On social platforms, SMS and meta tags, yes — a space is a character like any other. The reason this tool shows both totals is that a handful of systems do not count them: some database fields, some legacy form validators, and translation or typesetting quotes priced per keystroke. If you are checking against a public platform limit, use the 'with spaces' number. If a client or a form states a limit and you are not sure which they mean, ask, because on a 500-character brief the difference is typically 80 to 90 characters.

Because of the encoding, not the length. A single SMS holds 160 characters only while every character is in the GSM-7 alphabet — basic Latin letters, digits and common punctuation. Add one emoji, one curly quote pasted from Word, or one accented letter outside the GSM set, and the whole message switches to UCS-2 encoding, where a single SMS holds just 70 characters. Messages past the limit are split into segments of 153 (GSM-7) or 67 (UCS-2) characters, since each segment gives up space to header data. If a message splits unexpectedly, look for a smart quote or an em dash before you look for length.

Google truncates on pixel width, not character count — roughly 600px for a title and 960px for a description on desktop. As a working rule that is about 60 characters for a title and 150 to 160 for a description, but a title full of wide characters ('W', 'M') will cut earlier than one in narrow ones. Worth knowing before you optimise to the character: Google rewrites the description it shows for most results, so treat the limit as a ceiling for the message you most want to appear, not as a target to fill.

It counts the way JavaScript measures a string, in UTF-16 code units. Most emoji sit outside the basic range and count as 2, so '👋' adds 2 to the total, and emoji built from several joined parts — many flags, skin-tone variants and family emoji — count as 4 or more. Accented Latin letters count as 1, as do Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. This matches how X and most web forms count, but some platforms count by grapheme (what you see as one symbol), so an emoji-heavy post can measure slightly differently there. For text without emoji the counts are identical everywhere.

Yes. Each line break is one character and counts toward platform limits — a post with five paragraph breaks has already spent five characters on whitespace. It is included in the 'with spaces' total and excluded from the 'without spaces' total, along with tabs and ordinary spaces. That is worth checking on X, where line breaks are a common formatting choice and a long post can go over the limit purely because of them.