With or without spaces
Different places count differently. A brief that says “1,000 characters including spaces” counts every blank and punctuation mark; one that says “excluding spaces” counts only the visible letters. When the rule is not stated, plan for the count that includes spaces — submission forms usually measure the raw string that arrives in the field.
Line breaks count as spaces too. Every paragraph break adds one character, so a piece sitting right at the limit can be brought under it by deleting a single blank line.
How many characters is an emoji
Letters and digits are the same number however you count them. Emoji are where the methods split. A single smiling face takes two slots inside a program, a family emoji with several people in it takes up to eight, and flags and skin-tone variants behave the same way.
This tool counts what you see on screen as one character. Services that impose a character limit generally use the same rule, so the number here matches the one they will apply.
Why the byte count is different
In UTF-8, plain English letters and digits take one byte each. Accented letters take two, most CJK characters take three, and emoji take four. The same 100 characters can therefore be anywhere from 100 to 400 bytes.
That number matters in specific places. When a database column is declared VARCHAR(255), the 255 is often bytes rather than characters, and message payloads are usually capped in bytes as well. If the character count looks fine but the text will not save or arrives truncated, check this figure.
Where the limits actually sit
A few worth keeping in mind: a search result snippet is cut around 155 characters, a page title around 60, and a post on X allows 280. Meta descriptions are truncated by pixel width rather than a hard count, so treat 155 as a target rather than a rule.
What counts as a word
Languages written with spaces are counted by those breaks. Japanese and Chinese have none, so word boundaries are found separately — which is why a solid block of Chinese still returns a word count.