Free Character Counter Online
Count characters with and without spaces, bytes, words and lines. Set a character limit and see a visual progress bar. Results update in real time.
About the Character Counter
This free online character counter gives you an instant breakdown of your text: total characters (including spaces), characters without spaces, word count, line count, and UTF-8 byte size. The built-in limit checker lets you set a target character limit (great for Twitter/X, SMS, or meta descriptions) and shows your progress as a colour-coded bar.
Everything runs in your browser — no data is ever sent to a server. Ideal for writers, SEO specialists, social media managers and developers.
How to Use the Character Counter
Enter Your Text
Paste or type text in the text area. All counts update instantly.
Set a Limit (optional)
Enter a maximum character count in the limit field. The progress bar and status turn red when you exceed it.
Read the Stats
View character totals, word count, line count and byte size above the text area.
Copy or Clear
Copy the text to clipboard or clear the field with the buttons below.
Frequently Asked Questions
"Characters" counts every character including spaces, tabs and newlines. "Characters without spaces" counts only non-whitespace characters, giving the raw content length.
Byte size is calculated using the UTF-8 encoding. ASCII characters are 1 byte each, while characters like emoji, Chinese, Arabic etc. may be 2–4 bytes each. This is the byte size you would see if you saved the text to a .txt file in UTF-8.
Twitter/X allows 280 characters per tweet (set as the default limit). For SMS, use 160. For Google meta descriptions, 155–160 characters is recommended.
Yes, each newline (Enter key) counts as one character in the total character count and as one byte in UTF-8.