Character limits are everywhere once you start looking: 280 for a post on X, 160 in a text message segment, about 60 in a Google title and 160 in a meta description. This counter tracks characters with and without spaces as you type, and checks your text against the limits people run into most.
What counts as a character?
Every letter, digit, punctuation mark and space is one character — the same figure most forms and platforms show. “Characters without spaces” removes all whitespace (spaces, tabs and line breaks) and is the figure some assignments and applications ask for instead. Emoji are the exception that catches people out: in the underlying encoding an emoji is two code units, and in bytes it is four — which is why this page also shows the UTF-8 byte size.
The SMS trap
A plain text message segment holds 160 characters only while every character is in the basic GSM alphabet. Type one smart quote, an accented letter outside that set, or an emoji, and the whole message switches to Unicode: segments shrink to 70 characters and a “short” text can bill as three. The segments figure here applies that rule honestly.
Worked example
The sample sentence on this page is 48 characters with spaces and 41 without — and because it contains an em dash, it would travel as Unicode in an SMS, at 70 characters per segment rather than 160.
How to use this tool
- Type or paste the text you need to measure.
- Read characters with spaces (the headline) and without spaces in the stats.
- Check the limits table: anything red is over that platform's limit.
- Watch the SMS segment count if the text is headed for phones.
- Trim in this box and copy the text back out when it fits.
Title and description lengths are pixels, not characters
Google truncates titles and descriptions by pixel width, not a fixed character count — 60 and 160 characters are planning approximations that work for typical wording. Wide letters (W, M) run out sooner than narrow ones (i, l), so treat the limits here as guidance, and check anything critical in a SERP preview tool.
Character limits that actually apply
The counter above flags the limits people hit most often. An X (Twitter) post allows 280 characters. A standard SMS holds 160 characters in the GSM-7 alphabet — but add a single emoji or a character outside that alphabet and the whole message switches to Unicode, dropping each segment to 70 characters, which is why one emoji can double a texting bill. LinkedIn posts allow 3,000 characters and Instagram captions 2,200.
For websites, the limits are softer but real: search engines typically display about 50–60 characters of a page title and around 155–160 characters of a meta description before truncating — which is why the character count matters even when nobody set a hard limit. This counter's “without spaces” figure matches how many platforms and submission forms measure, so check both numbers before you paste.