Why your post is longer than it looks.
Count characters with and without spaces, and see how much is left of an X post, a text message or a search description, counted the way each counts.
By Suraj Kumar4 min read
A character is not always a character. X counts a link as 23 and an emoji as 2; a text message holds 160 characters until one curly quote makes it 70. The character counter counts each limit the way the place that sets it counts.
With and without spaces.
The count shows characters with spaces and without. Characters are counted as you see them, so 👨👩👧👦 is one and an accented letter is one however it is stored. Line breaks are left out of both counts, as most forms count them, but they do count towards a post or a message.
An X post: 280, weighed.
X does not count characters one for one. Following its own open-source counting rules (twitter-text), letters of Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and most other alphabets count 1, while Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters count 2; an emoji counts 2 however many parts make it; and every link counts 23, because X shortens it to that length. The page counts the same way and says how much is left.
A text message: 160, or 70.
A text message is sent in a small alphabet of 128 characters (GSM 7-bit) and holds 160 of them; €, [, ], {, }, ~, ^, \ and | take two places. One character outside that alphabet, such as an emoji, a curly quote or a letter with a rare accent, makes the whole message Unicode, which holds 70. Longer messages are sent in parts of 153 or 67 that the phone joins again, and many plans charge for each. The page names the characters that made a message Unicode, so you can change a curly quote to a straight one.
A search description: about 155.
Google says there is no limit on how long a page's description can be, but it cuts the snippet it shows to fit the screen. About 155 characters is a common rule of thumb, and the page calls it guidance, not a rule.
Nothing leaves your browser.
Everything is worked out on your device: what you paste, type or open is never sent anywhere, and nothing is kept when you leave the page. There are no adverts, no accounts and no limits on length.
Further reading
Topics: character counter · character count · tweet length · sms character limit · meta description length · count characters
A little less theory. A little more doing.
Try it on your own terms, with a free browser tool.
Try the tool