Character Counter
Counts update as you type. Nothing is sent anywhere, so drafts and confidential text are safe to paste. Emoji, surrogate pairs and combining marks are counted the way they look.
What is reported
Code points, graphemes (what a reader perceives as one character), UTF-16 code units, characters excluding line breaks, characters excluding whitespace, lines, words, UTF-8 bytes, Shift_JIS bytes, and 400-character manuscript sheets.
There is no single "character count"
"👨👩👧" is one grapheme, five code points and eight UTF-16 units. A "が" written with a combining mark is one grapheme and two code points. Twitter and Excel’s LEN() count UTF-16 units; language runtimes differ. Read whichever number matches your constraint.
When bytes matter
Database VARCHAR limits, fixed-width files and legacy reporting systems often cap byte length. A Japanese character is three bytes in UTF-8 and two in Shift_JIS (one for half-width kana); both are shown side by side.
Frequently asked questions
How are manuscript sheets calculated?
Characters excluding line breaks divided by 400 (a 20×20 Japanese manuscript sheet), rounded up.
How are emoji counted?
One grapheme; one or more code points depending on the sequence; two or more UTF-16 units. Social-media limits use UTF-16.
Is my text stored?
No. It is never sent anywhere and disappears from memory when you close the page.
How are words counted?
By runs separated by whitespace, including the ideographic space. Japanese is not written with spaces, so the word count is not meaningful for Japanese prose.