Character counter

Which "character" do you mean?

Character limits look simple until an emoji or an accented letter shows up. The flag 🇧🇷 is one symbol on screen but two Unicode code points, four UTF-16 units (what JavaScript's .length reports) and eight UTF-8 bytes (what a database column may count). This counter shows all of them, so you can match whichever rule your platform uses.

Set a limit to see how many characters you have left: 160 for a meta description, 280 for a post on X, 2,200 for an Instagram caption, 150 for a TikTok bio.

Worked example

é👍🏽 is 2 characters on screen: é and a thumbs-up with a medium skin tone. That is 3 code points (the thumb and the skin-tone modifier are separate), 5 UTF-16 units and 10 UTF-8 bytes. A field limited to 2 "characters" in JavaScript would reject it; a UTF-8 column of 10 bytes would just fit.

Spaces and lines

The characters-without-spaces row is what some essay and translation rates use.

The page counts user-perceived characters with Intl.Segmenter, the browser's implementation of Unicode text segmentation, so accented letters, flags and emoji sequences count once each. It also counts letters and digits with Unicode character classes, spaces, code points, UTF-16 code units (the JavaScript length), UTF-8 bytes from the browser's encoder, and lines. With a limit, the first row shows how many characters remain, negative when you are over. Everything runs in your browser.