Twitter/X Character Limit Counter

Paste the draft into the box. The page opens with a typical announcement post: 98 characters of text, ending in a space, followed by a full article URL 67 characters long.

Raw, that string is 165 characters, well inside 280 by naive counting, but that is not the number that matters. The counter finds one URL, values it at 23 instead of 67, and weighs the other 98 characters at 1 each. The result is 121 weighted characters with 159 remaining and 43.2% of the limit used, and the link alone accounts for a 44-character saving against its raw length.

That saving is why link-shorteners are pointless on X. A shortened link and a 200-character link cost exactly the same 23. Shortening only costs you the readable domain in the preview and, if you route through a third-party shortener, a layer of click tracking that some readers will not follow.

Below the headline count, the panel lists the raw string length, code points, characters charged double, emoji, CJK characters, links detected, link characters saved, words, and posts needed as a thread. The raw length and the weighted count are the pair to compare: for the announcement post they read 165 and 121.

The rules come from X's open-source twitter-text library, version 3 configuration (config/v3.json on the twitter/twitter-text GitHub repository). It sets a maximum weighted length of 280, a default weight of 200 on a scale of 100, a transformed URL length of 23, and four ranges at weight 100: code points 0-4351 (U+0000-U+10FF), 8192-8205 (U+2000-U+200D), 8208-8223 (U+2010-U+201F) and 8242-8247 (U+2032-U+2037). Dividing by the scale gives weights of 1 and 2.

Step 1. Normalise the text to Unicode NFC, so a letter plus a combining accent becomes one character.

Step 2. Find every link beginning with http://, https:// or www., and replace each with 23 weight-1 placeholder characters. The 23 is an editable input on the page.

Step 3. Walk the text one code point at a time: weight 1 if it falls in one of the four ranges, otherwise weight 2. Weighted length = the sum of all weights.

Step 4. Remaining = limit − weighted length; the post fits when weighted length ≤ limit; percent used = weighted ÷ limit × 100; thread parts = weighted ÷ limit, rounded up. The limit is 280 for Standard, 25,000 for Premium, or a custom figure.

Where this differs from twitter-text. With emoji parsing enabled, the library charges each complete emoji a single weight of 2, even when it is built from several code points. This counter weighs each code point, so a thumbs-up with a skin tone counts 4 here, a two-letter flag counts 4, and a man-woman-girl family sequence counts 8 (three emoji at 2 plus two zero-width joiners at 1), where the library would charge 2 for each. Single-code-point emoji such as the rocket agree. The library also recognises bare domains like example.com as links; this counter does not.

Take a short launch post ending in three emoji: "Launch day! The new calculator is live" plus a rocket, a party popper and a check mark, then "Try it today". That is 55 code points. The counter returns 58 weighted characters, 222 remaining, and flags 3 characters charged double. Each of those emoji is a single code point, so here the counter and twitter-text agree.

Now the other extreme. Twelve Japanese characters read as 24 weighted: every one of them sits outside the demoted ranges and is charged double. 140 Japanese characters weigh exactly 280 and fit; 141 weigh 282 and are 2 over. Korean Hangul behaves the same way: five Hangul syllables weigh 10.

When a draft does exceed the limit, the counter reports how many posts it would take as a thread. A 600-character plain English draft weighs 600, is 320 over, and needs 3 posts. That is a floor rather than a plan, because splitting mid-sentence is worse than splitting a little early, and each part of a real thread carries its own numbering and context.

For longer-form drafts that will not fit any thread comfortably, the word counter calculator gives the word and reading-time view, and the readability score calculator checks whether the compression has pushed the sentences past what a scrolling reader will parse.

The 280 figure applies to a standard post. X's Help Center documentation for X Premium (help.x.com, checked September 2026) states that subscribers can write longer posts of up to 25,000 characters, which everyone can read but only subscribers can create; that is the Premium option in the limit selector. Other surfaces on the platform, such as the bio, display name and alt text, have their own separate caps.

Some things attached to a post are free. Images, video, GIFs, polls and quoted posts do not consume characters from the text budget. Hashtags and @mentions typed into the body do: they are ordinary text, weighted like anything else. The four tags #WebDevelopment #JavaScriptTips #FrontendEngineering #CodeNewbie, with the spaces between them, use 64 of your 280.

One quirk worth knowing: the weight-1 range U+0000-U+10FF is generous enough to include Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian and Devanagari, so posts in those scripts get the full 280. The Hindi greeting नमस्ते weighs 6. The cut at U+1100 is where Hangul Jamo begins, and CJK scripts above it are charged double. Curly quotation marks and dashes sit in the small U+2010-U+201F range, so they cost 1 just like straight ASCII punctuation.

If you are drafting placeholder copy at a target length before writing the real thing, the Lorem Ipsum generator will produce text of an exact character count to test the layout against.

This counter applies the published twitter-text v3 weights, but it is a model of the rules, not a live connection to the platform. If X changes its configuration, this page reflects the version documented here rather than whatever shipped this morning. Treat a result within a couple of characters of the limit as worth double-checking in the compose box.

Composite emoji are the largest known divergence. Because this counter weighs code points individually, skin-tone variants, flags, and zero-width-joiner sequences such as families or professions are counted higher here than twitter-text counts them. For a draft that leans on those emoji, this page errs on the cautious side: it may say you are over when X would accept the post.

URL detection is the other soft edge. This page only recognises links beginning with http://, https:// or www. X also treats bare domains like example.com as links and charges them 23. A short bare domain is therefore counted lower here than on X, and a bare domain longer than 23 characters is counted higher.

Finally, the thread estimate is arithmetic, not editing. It divides the weighted length by the limit and rounds up. Real threads need room for numbering, for a hook in the first post, and for breaks that fall at sentence boundaries, so the number of posts you actually write is usually one or two more than the floor.

The Word Counter Calculator covers the word, sentence and reading-time view of a draft, which is the measure that matters once text leaves a character-capped field. The Flesch-Kincaid & Gunning Fog Readability Score Calculator checks whether compressing a message into 280 characters has made it harder to read rather than tighter. The Lorem Ipsum Generator produces filler of an exact character count for testing any capped field, and the Social Media Engagement Calculator measures how the posts you publish actually perform.