With spaces or without?
Unless a form or a brief says otherwise, a character count includes spaces. Use the count without spaces only when it is asked for explicitly, as some translation quotes, school assignments and publishers do.
The two figures above always add up: characters with spaces minus characters without spaces equals the number of spaces, tabs and line breaks in your text. The "Spaces" figure shows spaces and tabs only, without the line breaks.
What counts as a space
For the "without spaces" count, every Unicode white space character is removed, not just the space bar character:
- the normal space and the tab;
- line breaks (each new line in the box is one character);
- the non-breaking space, often pasted from Word or web pages, and the narrow non-breaking space used before French punctuation;
- the thin, em and en spaces used in typesetting.
Zero width characters (such as the zero width joiner inside some emoji) are not white space, so they stay in both counts.
Example
The sentence Hello world, how are you? has 25 characters with spaces and 21 without: four spaces separate the five words. Press Enter after it and type a second line: the count with spaces goes up by one for the line break.
Which count does each platform use?
Social networks, SMS and search engines all count spaces. A 280-character post on X includes the spaces between words, as does a 160-character SMS or a meta description. The count without spaces is mostly found in publishing and translation, where it measures the amount of actual text. In French publishing, the standard measure is the "signe", which includes spaces ("signes espaces comprises").
If you need words rather than characters, the word counter uses the same text box; for letters only (no digits, punctuation or spaces), use the letter counter.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces count as characters?
Yes, in almost every context: social networks, SMS, forms, search results and most word processors count spaces. Only counts labelled "without spaces" leave them out.
Do line breaks count as characters?
Yes. Each line break is one character in the count with spaces. Some systems store a line break as two characters (carriage return and line feed), which is why a text pasted into another tool can show a slightly different total.
How does Microsoft Word count characters without spaces?
Word's Word Count dialog (Review > Word Count) shows "Characters (no spaces)" and "Characters (with spaces)". Its figures are usually the same as here for ordinary text; differences can appear with footnotes, text boxes and line breaks, which Word handles separately.
Why is my count different from another tool?
Most often because of emoji or accented letters stored in two parts. A tool written in JavaScript that uses the plain string length counts most emoji as 2. This page shows that figure too, as "UTF-16 code units", in the Details panel.