With spaces vs without spaces
“With spaces” counts every character in the field, including blanks, tabs and line breaks. “Without spaces” removes all whitespace first. For the sample sentence that is 44 versus 36 — the difference is the 8 spaces. Publishers and translators usually price per character without spaces, while social platforms count with spaces.
Everything is counted locally in your browser as you type, so the text you paste is never uploaded, transmitted or stored on a server — safe for client drafts, contracts and unpublished copy.
If you want a different flavour of the same thing, try the word frequency counter.
Common character limits
Twitter/X posts allow 280 characters, SMS segments 160, Google title tags render about 60 and meta descriptions about 155. Instagram captions cap at 2,200. Paste a draft here first, then check the word total with the word counter if an editor also set a word limit.
Worked example: a meta description of 155 characters is roughly 25 English words, while a 280-character tweet is about 45. LinkedIn posts truncate at 210 characters in the feed, YouTube titles at 100, and an SMS that passes 160 characters is billed as two segments.
The text repeater covers the same ground with a different mechanism.
Emoji, accents and line breaks
Counting is done on JavaScript string units, so accented letters like é count as one, while some emoji built from multiple code points can count as two. A line break counts as one character, which is why pasted PDF text often looks longer than expected — clean it with the remove line breaks tool.
Frequently asked questions
- How many characters is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”?
- 44 characters with spaces and 36 characters without spaces.
- Do spaces count as characters?
- Yes on most platforms, including Twitter/X and SMS. The tool shows both totals so you can use either.
- How are line breaks counted?
- Each line break counts as one character in the with-spaces total and is ignored in the without-spaces total.
- Do emoji count as one character?
- Simple emoji usually count as two string units, and emoji with modifiers can count as more.
- Is there a limit on how much text I can paste?
- There is no fixed limit, and documents of tens of thousands of characters recount instantly. Very large pastes of a million characters or more may take a moment on slower devices, because all counting happens locally in your browser.