How many characters is a single SMS?

160 using the standard GSM alphabet. Adding any character outside it — an emoji, an accented letter, a curly quote — switches the entire message to UCS-2 encoding and drops the limit to 70, which is why one emoji can turn one text into two.

How many characters should a meta description be?

About 155. Google truncates around there on desktop and slightly shorter on mobile, so put the important part first. There is no penalty for going over — the tail is simply not shown.

Why does an emoji count as more than one character?

Because software counts code units, not glyphs. Most emoji are two UTF-16 units and four UTF-8 bytes, and composite ones like a family or a flag are built from several joined together. A 100-character field can reject far fewer than 100 emoji.

What is the difference between characters and bytes?

A character is what you see; a byte is storage. In UTF-8 an ASCII letter is one byte, an accented letter two, most CJK characters three, and emoji four. Database column limits are usually in bytes, so a field that holds 255 bytes may hold far fewer characters.

Is my text uploaded to be counted?

No. Counting happens live in your browser as you type, so nothing is transmitted at any point — which matters when the text is a draft, a password hint or anything else you would rather not paste elsewhere.

Character Counter

Count characters with live limits for X, meta descriptions, SMS and more.

TextRuns in your browserFree, no signup

About the Character Counter

Character limits are enforced in different units by different platforms, and this shows all of them at once. The count you need depends on the destination: a meta description is measured in characters, an SMS in septets or UCS-2 units, and a database column in bytes.

Emoji are where the counts diverge most sharply. A single emoji is one character to a person, but may be two UTF-16 code units to JavaScript, four bytes in UTF-8, and — for a family emoji built from several joined glyphs — a dozen or more of each. A field that allows 100 characters may reject a string of 40 emoji.

Common limits worth having to hand: 60 characters for a page title before Google truncates, 155 for a meta description, 160 for a single SMS in the Latin alphabet, and 70 if the message contains any non-Latin character, because it switches the whole message to a wider encoding.

How it works

Paste or type your text.
Watch the counter against the limits that matter — X posts, meta titles and descriptions, SMS segments.
Trim until every limit you care about shows green, then copy the text out.

Frequently asked questions

How many characters is a single SMS?: 160 using the standard GSM alphabet. Adding any character outside it — an emoji, an accented letter, a curly quote — switches the entire message to UCS-2 encoding and drops the limit to 70, which is why one emoji can turn one text into two.
How many characters should a meta description be?: About 155. Google truncates around there on desktop and slightly shorter on mobile, so put the important part first. There is no penalty for going over — the tail is simply not shown.
Why does an emoji count as more than one character?: Because software counts code units, not glyphs. Most emoji are two UTF-16 units and four UTF-8 bytes, and composite ones like a family or a flag are built from several joined together. A 100-character field can reject far fewer than 100 emoji.
What is the difference between characters and bytes?: A character is what you see; a byte is storage. In UTF-8 an ASCII letter is one byte, an accented letter two, most CJK characters three, and emoji four. Database column limits are usually in bytes, so a field that holds 255 bytes may hold far fewer characters.
Is my text uploaded to be counted?: No. Counting happens live in your browser as you type, so nothing is transmitted at any point — which matters when the text is a draft, a password hint or anything else you would rather not paste elsewhere.

Privacy

Everything happens locally. Your files are read by your own browser, processed on your device, and never uploaded — closing the tab is all it takes to erase them.

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