Character Counter
Count characters, words and lines instantly - with live social-media limit meters.
Platform limits
How this calculator works
A character counter answers a deceptively simple question - how long is this text, exactly? - that matters every time a platform enforces a hard limit. Paste or type into the box above and every count updates live: characters with spaces, characters without spaces, words and lines. The per-platform meters underneath translate the raw count into the limits you actually care about: an X/Twitter post caps at 280 characters, an Instagram bio at 150, and a Google meta description gets truncated around 155. Green means you are safe, amber means you are close, red means you are over.
Why count without spaces too? Some submission systems - job portals, scholarship forms, abstract fields - count only non-space characters, and discovering that after drafting is painful. Counting code points (rather than UTF-16 units) means emoji count as one character each, matching how most modern platforms count. The tool runs entirely in your browser: nothing you type is uploaded or stored, so drafts, passwords-adjacent text and unpublished work stay private.
Writers use the reading-time estimate to sanity-check articles (200 words per minute is the standard adult average), students check essay minimums, and social media managers pre-flight posts before publishing. Pair it with the Word Counter for keyword density analysis or the Case Converter to reformat headings without retyping.