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Character Counter

text → counts

Count characters, words, lines and bytes, with reading time.

text
characters
0
without spaces
0
words
0
sentences
0
lines
0
paragraphs
0
utf-8 bytes
what a database column or API limit actually measures
0
utf-16 units
what String.length reports in JavaScript
0
reading time
0 s

Characters are counted the way you see them: an emoji built from several code points, like a family or a flag, counts as one.

About Character Counter

Counts characters, words, sentences, lines, paragraphs and bytes as you type, plus an estimate of how long the text takes to read. Nothing to press — the numbers move with the text.

Three different counts are reported on purpose, because "length" means three different things depending on who is asking. Characters counts what you see, so an emoji made of several code points counts once. UTF-8 bytes is what a database column or an API payload limit actually measures. UTF-16 units is what JavaScript's String.length returns. A single emoji can be 1, 4 and 2 of those respectively — which is why a field that accepts 20 characters sometimes rejects text that looks much shorter.

Everything is counted in your browser, so you can paste a draft, a customer record, or an unpublished post without it going anywhere.

Common questions

Why are there three different length numbers?
Because systems disagree about what a character is. Twitter counts something close to graphemes, a VARCHAR(20) column counts bytes, and JavaScript counts UTF-16 code units. All three are shown so you can check against the limit that actually applies to you.
How is the word count calculated?
By splitting on whitespace, which matches how word processors count and how most "maximum words" rules are enforced. Hyphenated compounds count as one word, since there is no space in them.
Where does the reading time come from?
Words divided by 220 per minute, a typical adult silent-reading pace for ordinary prose. Treat it as an estimate — dense technical text reads a good deal slower, and it says nothing about how long a reader will actually stay.
Do trailing spaces and blank lines count?
Yes, in the character and byte counts, because they are real characters and a server counting bytes will see them too. The words and paragraphs counts ignore them, since they add nothing there.

This page does the work itself, in this tab. Nothing you paste is sent to a server. Close the tab and no copy remains.