Count the characters in any text

Character limits worth knowing

These are the usual limits at the time of writing. Platforms change them now and then, so check their own help when a post has to fit exactly.

Google measures search snippets in pixels rather than characters, so a description full of wide letters is cut sooner. Each platform also counts in its own way, so when you are within a few characters of a limit, let the platform's own counter have the last word.

What counts as a character

Every letter, digit, space, punctuation mark and line break counts as one. Text Studio counts the way Windows and web browsers store text in memory, which matters in a few cases:

• Emoji: most count as two, and the ones built from several parts, such as a thumbs-up with a skin tone or a family, count four or more.
• Accented letters: an é typed on a keyboard is one character. Some copied text stores it as an e plus a separate accent mark instead, and then it counts as two.
• Line breaks: each one is a character, so a caption on five short lines carries four extra.
• Tabs and non-breaking spaces count one each, even though you cannot see them.

Spaces you did not mean to type are the cheapest characters to lose. Collapse extra spaces in the Clean menu turns every double space into one, and Trim spaces at the ends of lines removes the ones hiding at line ends.

Text messages: 160 or 70

An SMS holds 160 characters when every character is in the GSM-7 alphabet: plain English letters, digits, common punctuation and a handful of accented letters such as é, ü and ñ. One character from outside it, such as an emoji, a curly quote or an á, switches the whole message to Unicode, and the limit drops to 70. A few GSM characters, among them the euro sign and square brackets, take two places each.

Longer messages are split into parts of 153 characters, or 67 in Unicode, and joined again on the phone. Bulk texting services usually bill each part, so one stray character can double the cost of a campaign.

Two items in Clean help here. Straighten quotes swaps the curly quotes that Word and phones type for straight ones, which are in the GSM alphabet, and Remove accents turns á into a. Text Studio cannot know which alphabet a phone will choose, so use its count together with these two.

Writing to fit

Long posts and threads are easier to fit when you write them in one place and measure as you go:

• Write a thread as separate paragraphs, then select each in turn: Selected: tells you whether it fits in 280.
• Put the meta descriptions for a set of pages on separate lines and select one line at a time to check each against 160.
• Paste the long version first, then cut: the count drops with every word you delete, and Ctrl Z brings back a cut you regret.
• For titles that will become web addresses, make the slug in the same window.

When the text is final, Copy all puts every character on the clipboard in one go, line breaks included, so what you paste into the post box is exactly what you counted.