Character limits are enforced far more strictly than word limits — a meta description that runs long is silently truncated, an SMS that exceeds 160 characters is billed as two, and a form field simply refuses the last keystroke. So it is worth knowing exactly what is being counted, because platforms count differently.
This tool reports characters with spaces and without spaces, because different limits mean different things by “character”, and reports both counts live as you type.
The limits that matter
| Where | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Meta description | ~155–160 | Google truncates by pixel width, not characters |
| Page title | ~50–60 | Same pixel-width caveat |
| SMS (GSM-7) | 160 | 153 per segment once concatenated |
| SMS (Unicode) | 70 | One emoji drops the whole message to this |
| Email subject line | ~40–60 visible | Mobile clients cut hardest |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 | Only the first ~125 show before “more” |
| Alt text | ~125 recommended | Screen readers handle more, users tire |
The SMS one catches people out badly. A standard message uses the 7-bit GSM alphabet and fits 160 characters. Include a single character outside that set — an emoji, a curly quote, an em dash — and the entire message switches to Unicode encoding, dropping the limit to 70. One smart quote can double your send cost.
Characters are not bytes
A character in the sense people mean is a Unicode code point. That is not the same as a byte, and not always the same as what you would call a “letter”:
- ASCII characters are one byte in UTF-8.
- Accented Latin characters are two bytes.
- Most CJK characters are three.
- Emoji are four, and often more than one code point.
The last case is the strange one. Many emoji are built from several code points joined together — a family emoji or a skin-tone variant can be four or five code points and a dozen bytes, while appearing as one glyph. Depending on how a platform counts, a single emoji may cost you 1, 2, 5 or 11 characters. If a limit is tight and emoji are involved, test against the real system.
Where people go wrong
Assuming Google counts characters. It does not — search result snippets are truncated by pixel width. A description full of capitals and wide letters truncates sooner than one of the same length in narrow lowercase. Treat ~155 as a guide and put the important words first regardless.
Forgetting that spaces count. Almost every platform limit includes spaces. The without-spaces figure is useful for typography estimates and for the rare system that excludes them, not for planning against a limit.
Counting line breaks inconsistently. A newline is a character. On some systems it is two (carriage return plus line feed), which is why a long document can count slightly differently after passing through a Windows editor.
Writing to exactly the limit. Leave headroom. Platforms change limits, and a description that is truncated mid-word looks careless in a way that a slightly shorter one never does.
Using character count as a proxy for length. For comparing two pieces of prose, words are the better unit — see the word counter. Characters matter when a system is enforcing them, and rarely otherwise.
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