Twitter / X Character Counter

Twitter/X limits a standard post to 280 characters, but it does not count raw keystrokes. Any URL is collapsed to a fixed 23 characters because the platform rewrites links through its t.co shortener, so a long link costs the same as a short one. The official count also normalizes text (Unicode NFC) and weights code points: Latin letters, digits, and punctuation weigh 1, while CJK, Arabic, and most other non-Latin characters weigh 2, and a whole emoji counts as 2. This tool is a close but simplified approximation. It detects links only when they include an explicit http:// or https:// prefix and replaces them with 23 characters; bare domains like example.com are counted literally. For everything else it uses the string's UTF-16 code-unit length. That means simple emoji happen to count as 2, but multi-part emoji (skin tones, flags, family sequences) are over-counted, and non-Latin scripts are under-counted versus the real limit. For exact, standards-grade counts, Twitter publishes the open-source twitter-text library that implements the full weighting algorithm.