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String Length Calculator

Paste or type any text and instantly see character count, word count, line count, and more. Updates in real time as you type — no button needed.

0 / 280 characters 280 remaining
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Characters
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Words
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Lines
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Chars (no spaces)
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Sentences
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Paragraphs
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Unique Words
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Bytes (UTF-8)
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Reading Time
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Real-Time Updates
Every stat updates instantly as you type or paste — no button click required
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9 Metrics at Once
Characters, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, unique words, bytes, and reading time
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Character Limits
Check against Twitter, SMS, meta description, page title, and custom limits with a visual bar
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100% Private
All calculations run in your browser — your text is never sent to any server

Common Character Limits Reference

Platform / Use Case Character Limit Notes
Twitter / X post 280 URLs count as 23 characters
SMS message 160 Standard GSM 7-bit encoding
Meta description 155–160 Google typically shows up to 160 chars
SEO page title 50–60 Pixel-based; ~60 chars is a safe limit
Mastodon post 500 Default; server admins can raise this
Facebook post 63,206 Practically unlimited for most use cases
Instagram caption 2,200 Only first 125 chars show before "more"
YouTube title 100 ~70 chars displayed in search results

Count Characters and Words in Any Text

Character and word counts matter in more situations than most people expect. Every social media platform imposes its own limits, SEO best practices demand specific title and description lengths, SMS messages become multi-part if they exceed 160 characters, and programming tasks often require knowing the exact byte size of a string rather than its character count. This string length calculator gives you nine different metrics simultaneously so you can answer all of those questions from a single paste.

The byte count uses UTF-8 encoding rules: ASCII characters count as 1 byte each, most Western European characters as 2 bytes, and emoji or characters from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts as 3 or 4 bytes. This distinction matters when you are working with database column sizes, HTTP Content-Length headers, or any system where storage is measured in bytes rather than characters.

The character limit bar lets you benchmark your text against common platform limits. Select Twitter, SMS, or meta description from the dropdown and a progress bar shows you exactly how much of the limit you have used. When you exceed the limit the bar turns red and the remaining count goes negative, making it easy to see how much you need to cut. You can also enter a custom limit for any specific requirement.

How Each Metric Is Calculated

  • Characters: The total number of Unicode code points in the text, including spaces, newlines, and punctuation. This is what most character limits count.
  • Characters (no spaces): Characters after stripping all whitespace — spaces, tabs, and newlines. Useful for density calculations and some publishing platforms.
  • Words: Consecutive non-whitespace sequences. "Hello, world!" counts as two words regardless of the comma.
  • Lines: The number of newline-separated lines. An empty textarea counts as 0 lines; a single line with no newline counts as 1.
  • Sentences: Sequences ending in a period, exclamation mark, or question mark followed by whitespace or end of text.
  • Paragraphs: Blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines.
  • Unique words: Distinct words counted case-insensitively. "The" and "the" count as the same word.
  • Bytes (UTF-8): The actual storage size of the string encoded in UTF-8. ASCII text has 1 byte per character; emoji typically use 4 bytes each.
  • Reading time: Estimated at 200 words per minute, which is a common average for silent reading.