String Length Counter — Free Online Character, Word & Byte Counter
Count characters, bytes, words, lines, and Unicode code points — with platform-specific length limits.
Frequently Asked Questions
String Length: Characters, Bytes, and Unicode Complexity
Measuring string length seems simple but has important nuances across programming languages and storage systems. JavaScript's string.length counts UTF-16 code units, not visible characters — emoji like 😀 are 2 code units (a surrogate pair) but appear as 1 character. Python 3 counts Unicode code points. Go counts bytes.
UTF-8 byte count is critical for database column sizing, HTTP headers, cookie limits, and any system that stores strings as bytes. ASCII characters are 1 byte in UTF-8, but common extended characters (accents, cyrillic, arabic) use 2-3 bytes, and emoji use 4 bytes. A VARCHAR(100) stores different amounts of data depending on the character set.
For SEO: Google truncates title tags around 60 characters and meta descriptions around 155 characters. For social media: Twitter/X allows 280 characters. For SMS: 160 characters for GSM-7 encoding, only 70 for unicode messages. This tool shows all these metrics simultaneously with platform limit indicators.
Built and maintained by the DevDecode engineering team. Every tool runs entirely in your browser — input is never uploaded, logged, or sent to any server. Found an issue? Let us know.