Character & Word Counter

Type or paste and watch the counts move: characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, lines, and the size in UTF-8 bytes. The point of showing them side by side is that they disagree, and the disagreement is what bites when a limit is being enforced somewhere you cannot see — a post that must fit, a meta description that must not be truncated, a column that counts bytes rather than letters.

Characters here means Unicode code points, which is already a better answer than most code gives. JavaScript's own .length counts UTF-16 units, so a grinning face 😀 reads as 2 there and as 1 here. But code points are not the last word either. The family emoji 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 is a single thing on screen and counts as 7, because it is four people joined by three invisible zero-width joiners — and it occupies 11 UTF-16 units and 25 UTF-8 bytes. Nothing is wrong in any of those four numbers; they are answers to four different questions.

Bytes are the number that surprises people from outside the Latin alphabet. An ASCII letter is one byte, an accented Latin letter is two, 한 and most CJK characters are three, and an emoji is four. So a 255-byte field holds 255 English characters or 85 Korean ones, and a message that looked well within a limit in one language overflows it in another. When a system's limit is described in "characters", it is worth finding out which of these it means before trusting the margin.

Two counts are approximations by nature. Words are whitespace-separated runs, which works for languages that put spaces between words and does not for Chinese, Japanese or Thai, where a whole paragraph counts as one. Sentences are splits on ., !, ? and their full-width equivalents, so an abbreviation like Dr. Smith reads as two sentences and a decimal point inside a number reads as a boundary. Both are fine for a rough sense of length and wrong for anything that has to be exact.