Character Counter

In short A character counter reports two numbers because the platforms you are writing for disagree about which one they mean. X counts 280 characters including spaces; an SMS counts 160, and drops to 70 the moment a single non-GSM character such as an emoji or a curly quote appears, because the whole message switches to a two-byte encoding. Meta descriptions are usually cut around 155, title tags around 60, an Instagram caption allows 2,200, a LinkedIn post 3,000, a YouTube title 100 and a YouTube description 5,000. The counting itself is done by Unicode code point rather than by byte, which is what makes an emoji count as one character even though it occupies four bytes in UTF-8 — and it is why a caption that fits a limit here can still be rejected by a system that counts bytes instead. The other trap is invisible characters. A zero-width space or a stray byte-order mark pasted in from a word processor counts against your limit while showing nothing at all, which is the usual explanation when a field says you are three characters over and you cannot see them.