Character Counter

Standard SMS messages are limited to 160 characters per segment for plain GSM-7 text; longer messages are split into multiple linked segments by carriers. This tool shows how many 160-character segments your text would take, which is how most carriers actually bill and send long texts.

X counts most characters as 1 but weights some non-Latin characters (like CJK characters) as 2, and it automatically shortens any URL to a fixed length regardless of how long the real link is. This tool counts raw characters, so a post with links or non-Latin text may show a different number than X's own composer.

Yes — platforms adjust their limits periodically. The figures here reflect commonly published limits at the time of writing; if a platform has changed its limit since, treat this as a close estimate rather than the current official number.

No — counting happens locally in your browser as you type. Nothing you write is transmitted or saved.

It's based on your live word count divided by 200 words per minute, a commonly used average adult silent-reading speed. Results under a minute are shown in seconds; longer text is shown in minutes and seconds. Actual reading speed varies by person and content, so treat it as a useful estimate rather than an exact figure.

Letters and digits are matched using Unicode letter and number categories, so accented letters and non-Latin scripts are counted correctly, not just A–Z and 0–9. Whitespace covers spaces, tabs, and line breaks. Punctuation & symbols covers marks like periods and commas as well as symbols such as $, %, and emoji. Anything left over — mostly combining accent marks and other formatting characters — is grouped under Other.

The Characters count is your browser's raw text length, which is how platforms like X and SMS carriers measure length. UTF-8 Bytes measures how many bytes that same text takes up once encoded, which matters for size limits measured in bytes rather than characters. Plain English letters, numbers, and punctuation take 1 byte each in UTF-8, but accented letters and non-Latin scripts typically take 2–3 bytes each and emoji can take 4 bytes each, so text with those characters will show a byte count higher than its character count.

The Characters count counts raw browser text units, and emoji or certain rare symbols are counted as two units each. The character breakdown instead groups text by whole Unicode characters, counting an emoji as one symbol rather than two, so text containing emoji can show a breakdown total slightly lower than the Characters count. Both numbers are correct — they're just counting slightly different things.

The tool counts every non-whitespace character in your text — spaces, tabs, and line breaks are excluded — and shows whichever one appears most often, along with its count and share of all non-whitespace characters. Turn on "Case-sensitive" to count uppercase and lowercase letters separately (so "A" and "a" are tracked apart); leave it off to combine them. If multiple characters are tied for the top spot, whichever one appears first in your text is shown.