Guides

Short answers to counting questions. Every number here was counted with the tools on this site and checked by its tests.

• How X counts characters: emoji, links and the 280 limit

  X counts a weighted length, not characters: Latin letters count 1, Korean, Chinese and Japanese characters 2, every link 23 and each emoji 2. A table of examples counted with our tool and checked against twitter-text.

• Why a 161-character text costs two messages

  One SMS holds 160 GSM-7 characters, but split messages hold only 153 each, and a single emoji or curly quote drops the limit to 70. Tables of where the breaks fall, counted with our SMS tool.

• Characters, code points, bytes: why 👨‍👩‍👧 is 1, 5 or 18

  One emoji can be 1 character, 5 code points, 8 UTF-16 units or 18 bytes. What each number measures, a table of common cases counted four ways, and which one a length limit is likely to use.