Twitter / X Character Counter
Count characters using Twitter's real weighting rules (emoji = 2, URLs = 23).
Written by Anil Gautam · Updated
How does X count the characters in a post?
The counter uses the character weights published in twitter-text, the open-source library that defines the 280-character count on X. A Unicode code point weighs 1 if it falls in the light ranges: U+0000 to U+10FF, which covers Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai and the Indian scripts, plus parts of the General Punctuation block with special spaces, dashes, curly quotes and prime marks. Everything else weighs 2, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, most emoji, and symbols such as €, ₹, the bullet and the one-character ellipsis (…). A post written entirely in Chinese therefore fits 140 characters.
Text that starts with http:// or https:// counts as 23 up to the next space, whatever its length. A draft made of "New guide: how to compress a PDF under 200 KB for job portals" plus a 72-character link shows 134 total characters but a weight of 85: 62 for the words and the space before the link, and 23 for the link, leaving 195. Add a rocket emoji and a space and the weight rises to 88.
Why might X show a different number?
Emoji built from several code points are counted part by part. Flags, skin-tone variants, family groups and the red heart with its variation selector belong here: India's flag (two regional indicator symbols) and a thumbs-up with a skin tone weigh 4 each, and a three-person family weighs 8. X counts a complete emoji sequence as 2, so drafts with these emoji show a higher figure here than X does.
Bare domains go the other way. Only links with the http:// or https:// prefix get the flat 23, so example.com/guides/compress-pdf is counted letter by letter as 31, while X usually turns a bare domain into a link. Add https:// in front before checking. A full stop typed straight after a link is absorbed into it here and adds nothing.
The bar turns amber above 252, which is 90 percent of the limit, and red from 281, with the overage shown beside it. Total characters counts code points, Words splits on whitespace, and Sentences counts runs of full stops, question marks or exclamation marks followed by whitespace or the end of the text.
How do I get a post under 280?
Shortening a link saves nothing, because a 15-character link and a 200-character link both count 23; dropping a link and the space before it saves 24. Hindi and the other Indian scripts weigh 1 per code point, but a conjunct such as क्ष is three code points, so a Hindi post weighs more than its count of visible letters suggests. When a draft still runs long, Twitter Thread Splitter breaks it into numbered posts. Its per-post figures are plain character counts, so paste borderline posts back here for the weighted total. Counting happens in your browser.