Character Counter

Counting characters is more subtle than it looks, because of how Unicode represents text. A single visible character — called a grapheme — can be made up of multiple code points, and each code point can take multiple bytes in UTF-8 encoding. The string 'é' can be one code point (U+00E9, 2 bytes in UTF-8) or two code points (e + combining accent, U+0065 + U+0301, 3 bytes). Visually identical, different counts.

Most platforms count using Unicode code points, which is what most people expect. A tweet, a meta description, an SMS — these all have code-point-based limits. We do the same. But for storage and bandwidth planning, you also need to know the byte count, which is what the file actually takes up on disk or over the wire.

Grapheme-cluster counting (the visible character count) is the most accurate for length limits that users perceive, but it's also the most computationally expensive. For text that doesn't use combining characters or complex emoji, code-point counting and grapheme counting give the same answer. For text with emoji or accented characters in composed form, they can differ.