What is the difference between total characters and no spaces?

Total characters is the raw length of everything you pasted, including spaces, tabs and line breaks. No spaces subtracts every whitespace character. Most fields that enforce a limit — meta descriptions, SMS, form inputs, database columns — count differently again, which is why both figures are shown side by side rather than a single number.

How does it count emoji and other non-Latin characters?

The total is JavaScript's string length, which counts UTF-16 code units. Most emoji and many CJK, Arabic and Indic characters are stored as a surrogate pair and therefore count as 2, not 1. A single 👍 is 2 characters, and a family emoji made of several joined symbols can count as 11. If your limit is a real-world limit like a Twitter post, this tool can overstate the count for emoji-heavy text.

How are letters and punctuation classified?

Letters are matched as ASCII a-z and A-Z only, so accented characters such as é, ü or ñ are counted as punctuation rather than letters. Punctuation is anything that is neither a word character nor whitespace, which means symbols like %, &, @ and + are counted here too, and the underscore counts as a word character rather than punctuation. Spaces counts all whitespace, so tabs and newlines are included.

Character Counter

Free online character counter. Count chars with/without spaces, letter density. No sign-up, works in your browser.

Total Characters

No Spaces

Letters

Digits

Spaces

Punctuation

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Frequently Asked Questions about Character Counter

Character Counter — Six Live Character Counts

This character counter breaks your text down into six figures as you type: total characters, characters excluding spaces, letters, digits, spaces, and punctuation. Counts update on every keystroke with no button to press, and the counting happens in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.

This is the tool you actually need whenever a limit is expressed in characters rather than words. Those limits are everywhere and they are unforgiving: a 160-character SMS that silently becomes two billed messages, a 70-character meta description that Google truncates mid-word, a 255-character database column, a 100-character subject line, a bio field that rejects spaces.

The Six Counters, Precisely Defined

The exact definitions matter, because two tools claiming to count "characters" can legitimately return different numbers. This one counts like this:

Counter	What it counts	Where the limit comes from
Total characters	Every single character typed, including spaces and line breaks.	The 160-character SMS boundary; Twitter/X posts.
No spaces	Total with all whitespace stripped out.	Bio fields and database schemas that disallow blanks.
Letters	A–Z and a–z only. Not numbers, not punctuation.	Academic and form word-count rules that exclude numerals.
Digits	0–9 only.	Data-entry validation, such as account or licence numbers.
Spaces	Whitespace of any kind — spaces, tabs and line breaks.	Layout checks, and spotting accidentally doubled spaces.
Punctuation	Anything that is neither a word character nor whitespace.	Readability metrics, which treat punctuation as sentence boundaries.

Why "Total" and "No Spaces" Are Both Shown

The gap between the two is a useful diagnostic. For ordinary prose, spaces are roughly 15% of a text, so the two figures sit close together. When they diverge sharply, something is wrong in the input. A "no spaces" count far above the letter count means the text is mostly digits. A total count far above letters plus digits plus punctuation means the text is full of invisible characters.

That last case is worth dwelling on. Pasting from a web page or a PDF often carries invisible characters — non-breaking spaces, zero-width joiners, soft hyphens, or a stray byte-order mark. They count as characters, they are invisible on screen, and they will quietly break a URL or a hashtag. The Invisible Character Finder exists to find and remove exactly these.

The Counting Rules That Cause Arguments

If your count disagrees with another website's, it is almost always one of these three disagreements, and none of them means either tool is broken:

Emoji and astral characters. An emoji such as 🎉 is a single visible glyph but is stored as a surrogate pair, occupying two code units. A tool counting UTF-16 code units — which most JavaScript does, and which this one does — will report it as two characters. Counting grapheme clusters instead would report one. There is no universal answer, which is why a tweet with several emoji can appear to exceed 280.
Whether line breaks count. A newline is a character. Some counters exclude it, some include it. This tool counts it, which is why pasting a multi-line block can push you over a limit that a single-line counter would not.
Trailing spaces. A copied paragraph often carries an invisible trailing space or two, enough to turn 159 into 161. Nothing looks wrong on screen.

Related Counting Tools

Word Counter — words, sentences, paragraphs, lines and reading time alongside the character counts.
Sentence Counter and Paragraph Counter — structure rather than length.
Readability Score — Flesch Reading Ease and grade level.
Remove Line Breaks — collapse hard-wrapped lines when a character limit is being blown by formatting.
Text Summarizer — cut length without hand-editing every character.