About this tool
Character limits are stricter than word limits and much easier to breach without noticing. A bio field that stops at 150, an SMS that becomes two messages at 161, a form box that silently truncates whatever you paste past its cap. Four numbers here answer the usual questions at once: the total, the total without spaces, the word count and the number of lines.
Characters are counted as Unicode code points. For plain English that is the same as counting letters. For Devanagari it is not: क्या shows as two clusters on screen but is four code points, because the halant and the vowel sign are characters in their own right. That is generally how a form’s limit measures it too, which is why the count works that way rather than counting what the font draws.
Where the tool and a form disagree, it is almost always because the form is counting bytes instead. Devanagari takes three bytes per code point in UTF-8, so a byte-counting field will run out much sooner than this page suggests. Get close here, then trust the counter on the form itself. Either way the text never leaves your device.
How to use this tool
- Paste your text. Anything goes in the box: a bio, an SMS, a form field you have already overrun, a paragraph of Hindi.
- Run it. The count happens on your device. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is kept.
- Read the four numbers. Total characters, characters without spaces, words, and lines.
What this tool does not do
- It counts code points, not what a font draws on screen and not UTF-8 bytes. A form that counts bytes will give a higher number for Devanagari.
- It does not check your text against a limit or trim it. You compare the numbers yourself.
- It cannot read a file. Paste the text.
- It does not tell you where the limit falls in your text or where to cut.
Common questions
Which number does an online form usually mean?
Most count everything including spaces, which is the first figure here. Some count only the visible characters. If the form has its own live counter, treat that as the authority and use this to get into range before you paste.
Why does a Hindi word count as more characters than it looks?
Because the count is of Unicode code points, not of what you see. क्या looks like two clusters on screen but is four code points — क, the halant, य and the vowel sign. Character limits on forms usually measure it the same way, which is why the tool does.
How are emoji counted?
By the same rule, so an emoji is at least one and often several. A flag or a skin-tone variant is built from multiple code points and counts as each of them.
How are lines counted?
Every line break makes a new line, blank lines included. Text with no line break at all is one line; an empty box is zero lines. It does not matter whether the breaks came from Windows or from a phone.
Does it count spaces at the end?
Yes, in the total. Trailing spaces are invisible and they still fill a character limit, which is a common reason a form says you are three characters over when the text looks fine.