Counting characters
A character is any single unit of text — a letter, digit, punctuation mark, space or line break. The total with spaces counts everything; without spaces strips out spaces, tabs and newlines. Many forms and platforms enforce a maximum, so an accurate live count keeps you inside the limit.
Note that some emoji and accented characters are made of more than one underlying code unit, which is why platforms sometimes count them differently — this tool reports the visible character count using the browser's text length.
Worked example
The text "Hi there!":
Common limits
Different places cap text length: a single SMS is 160 characters, an X/Twitter post is 280, a search-engine page title shows about 60, and a meta description about 160. Social bios are often 150–160. This counter highlights how close you are to these limits so you can trim before you hit them — especially useful for titles and descriptions that get truncated mid-sentence.