Character Counter

Features

• Nine platform presets plus a custom limit
• Live remaining count that goes negative when over
• Optional exclusion of spaces
• SMS segment calculation including Unicode handling
• Visual usage meter

How to use it

1. Pick the platform you are writing for.
2. Type or paste your text.
3. Watch the remaining count as you write.
4. Copy the text once it fits.

Why character limits are not all the same

Different platforms count differently, and the differences matter. X counts most characters as one but treats CJK characters as two, and any URL as a fixed 23 characters regardless of its real length. Meta descriptions have no hard limit at all, Google truncates around 155 to 160 characters of rendered width, so a description full of wide characters gets cut sooner than the count suggests.

SMS is the strangest case. A message using only the GSM 7-bit alphabet fits 160 characters in one segment. Include a single character outside that set, a curly apostrophe, an em dash or any emoji, and the whole message switches to UCS-2 encoding, dropping the limit to 70 characters per segment. That is why pasting text from a word processor can unexpectedly triple your messaging cost: the smart quotes did it.

Multi-part messages shrink further, to 153 characters per segment for GSM and 67 for UCS-2, because each part carries a header telling the receiving phone how to reassemble them. The segment counter here accounts for all of that, so it will sometimes show two segments where a naive character count suggests one.