How to use the Character Counter
- Type in the text box, or paste text you've copied from somewhere else.
- The character counts with and without spaces, plus the word, line and byte counts, update as you type.
- If you have a limit to meet, such as for an application essay, enter a Target character count and choose whether it counts spaces. The tool then shows how many characters you have left.
- When you're finished, click Copy text to copy everything and paste it into the submission form.
Characters with spaces vs. without spaces
With spaces counts every character, including spaces and line breaks. Without spaces leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks and counts only the visible characters. In ordinary English prose, roughly one character in six is a space, so the with-spaces count is usually noticeably higher.
Most online forms and application portals count characters including spaces. For example, the UCAS personal statement limit and the character limits on social media posts both count spaces. Some systems count characters without spaces, words or bytes instead. If the instructions mention "bytes", check the byte counts explained below.
How bytes are counted
A byte is a unit of the storage space a character takes up on a computer. How many bytes a character needs depends on the character encoding.
| Character | UTF-8 | EUC-KR |
|---|---|---|
| English letters, digits, spaces | 1 byte | 1 byte |
| Accented letters (é, ü, ñ) | 2 bytes | Not fully supported |
| Korean, Chinese and Japanese characters | 3 bytes | 2 bytes (Korean) |
| Emoji | 4 bytes or more | Not supported (estimated as 2 bytes) |
| Line break | 1 byte (LF) | 2 bytes (often counted as CRLF) |
UTF-8 is the standard on today's web and the one you'll need most often, such as for database field limits, API payloads or file sizes. EUC-KR is a legacy Korean encoding still used by some older systems. If your text is plain English, both byte counts are about the same as the character count.
Common character and word limits
- Text messages (SMS): one standard message holds 160 characters. If it contains emoji or certain special characters, the limit drops to 70.
- Social media: platforms set their own limits, such as 280 characters for a standard post on X. Check the current limit for your platform and account type.
- Applications and personal statements: some portals limit characters (UCAS uses 4,000 characters including spaces), while others limit words (the Common App essay allows 650 words). Make sure you're checking the right measure.
- SEO: page titles and meta descriptions get cut off in search results when they're too long, so many writers keep titles to about 60 characters and descriptions to about 155-160.
Tips for hitting a character limit
- Aim to use about 90-100% of the limit. An answer that's much too short can look like it lacks effort.
- Don't delete spaces or squeeze words together to save characters, because it makes your text hard to read. Cut repeated ideas, filler words and unnecessary transitions instead.
- Text pasted from Word or Google Docs can include hidden line breaks. If the line or paragraph count looks wrong, clean the text up with the Line Break Remover.
- The Pages figure is the with-spaces count divided by 200 and rounded up. It's based on traditional 200-square Korean manuscript paper. For English documents, a common rule of thumb is about 250 words per double-spaced page, so use the word count to estimate page length.