Character count is the total number of characters in a text — letters, digits, punctuation, and, on most platforms, spaces. Technically it counts Unicode code points. For example, "Hello, world!" is 13 characters with spaces and 12 without; the comma, the exclamation mark, and the single space all count. Our character counter reports both the with-spaces and without-spaces totals because different platforms measure differently.
Character limits are everywhere. A classic Twitter/X post is capped at 280 characters, an SMS message splits at 160, an SEO meta description is usually trimmed by search engines near 155–160, and a page title around 60. Translation and localisation vendors frequently price per character (often excluding spaces), so the count is a direct cost figure. Databases and form fields impose their own maximums.
The nuance is in what counts as one character. Spaces are the most common source of disagreement — many platforms include them, translation pricing often excludes them. Emoji and accented letters are trickier: a single visible emoji may be one code point or a sequence of several joined by zero-width joiners, so a flag or a skin-toned emoji can register as more than one character even though it looks like one glyph. Line breaks may or may not be counted. Character count is closely related to word count, but they answer different questions: word count cares about tokens, character count cares about raw length. Both depend on how the text is first split — see tokenization.