Character Counter for Posts, Ads and Forms

How to use the Character Counter

1. Paste or type your text into the box — the breakdown updates with every keystroke.
2. Read the headline totals first: Characters for limits that count everything you type, Without spaces for limits that ignore whitespace.
3. Use the breakdown rows to trim smartly: your text is split into letters, digits, spaces, and punctuation & symbols.
4. Check Unique characters when a form demands variety — it counts how many different characters appear at least once.
5. Copy the summary, or download it, when you need the figures kept alongside the text they describe.

About this tool

Character limits are everywhere: social posts, search-result snippets, form fields, ad headlines and text messages all cut you off at a fixed number. This counter shows the totals that matter — with and without spaces — plus a breakdown of letters, digits, spaces and symbols, so you can see exactly what is eating your budget and trim the right thing instead of deleting words at random. Unlike naive counters, it understands modern text: accented letters and characters from any alphabet count as letters, digits are counted separately, and the unique-character count shows how many different characters your text uses — handy for checking password rules, validating form data, or spotting odd characters hiding in a sample. Which number should you watch? If a platform counts every keystroke, spaces included, the Characters total is your budget. Forms and tools that speak of “characters without spaces” mean exactly that: every space, tab and line break stripped out before counting. The Spaces row tells you how much of your text is breathing room — in the worked example below, 32 of the 195 characters are spaces — and spacing is the first place to claw characters back when a draft lands just over a limit. Modern text has one quirk worth knowing: emoji and some symbols are stored as pairs of code units, so a single 🎉 adds 2 to the Characters total. That is the same measure most apps and APIs use when they enforce a limit, so the count here matches what the platform will see. Letters with accents, and letters from scripts like Arabic, Chinese or Cyrillic, each count once, as they should. Counting whole documents rather than limits? The word counter shows words, sentences and paragraphs alongside the character totals.

Who uses the Character Counter?

Social media writers fit posts to the 280-character X limit, SEO writers keep meta descriptions and titles inside what Google shows, advertisers check Google Ads headlines and descriptions against their 30- and 90-character limits, and anyone sending an SMS or filling in a form with a character cap checks the count before it gets cut off.

Worked example

The tool's own sample text is about character limits — here is what the counter makes of it: You paste

Character limits matter: a tweet allows 280, an SMS segment holds 160, and a good meta description stays under 160. Paste your text here and watch every count update live, character by character.

You see (live breakdown)

Characters — 195
Without spaces — 163
Letters — 148
Digits — 9
Spaces — 32
Punctuation & symbols — 6
Unique characters — 34
Words — 33

The 9 digits come from the three limits the text itself mentions — 280, 160 and 160. Spaces account for 32 of the 195 characters; strip them out and the same text measures 163, which is why the “without spaces” figure always looks kinder.

Features

• Both totals that platforms use: every character, and characters with all spaces, tabs and line breaks removed.
• A full breakdown — letters, digits, spaces, punctuation & symbols — so you can see what is filling your limit.
• Unique-character count for password rules, form validation and data-quality checks.
• Unicode-aware counting: accented letters and world scripts count as letters, and emoji count the way the apps count them.
• Live results as you type, with a word count alongside for quick reference.
• Copy or download the summary; everything runs privately in your browser.