There is more than one character count
‘Character count’ sounds like a single number, but in practice you get several different values depending on what you treat as one character. That is why pasting the same essay into two sites often gives results a few characters apart. The difference almost always comes from three things: whether spaces are counted, how line breaks are counted, and how many characters are assigned to things like emoji that are built from several code points.
With spaces and without spaces
With spaces counts every space as a character too. The Korean phrase ‘안녕 하세요’ (hello, written here with a space) is 6 characters with spaces. Without spaces removes all blank characters such as spaces, tabs and line breaks, so the same phrase is 5 characters.
Korean puts a space after every eojeol (a word plus its attached particles), so spaces make up a fair share of a text. An eojeol is usually three or four syllables long, so in ordinary prose spaces commonly account for around one fifth of all characters. As a result, ‘1,000 characters with spaces’ and ‘1,000 characters without spaces’ are quite different amounts of writing. Under a without-spaces limit you can fit more content.
If the recipient does not state which basis they use, it is safest to aim for the stricter one: with spaces.
How many characters is a line break?
Line breaks are where services differ the most.
- Some count a line break as 1 character
- Some do not count line breaks at all
- Some count a Windows-style line break (the two characters CR+LF) as 2 characters
In a text with 10 paragraphs, this alone can shift the count by 10 to 20 characters. This tool counts any line break — Windows, Mac or Linux — as 1 character, and if you turn off ‘Count line breaks as characters’, line breaks are left out. The without-spaces count never includes line breaks, regardless of the option.
Emoji and combining characters
Inside a computer, characters are stored as numbers called ‘code points’. Most characters are one code point each, but there are exceptions.
- Emoji sequences: the family emoji 👨👩👧 is made of three people plus two invisible joiner characters (ZWJ), 5 code points in total. JavaScript's basic length calculation returns 8.
- Skin tones and flags: 👍🏽 is a hand plus a skin-tone modifier, and 🇰🇷 is two regional indicator symbols.
- Decomposed Hangul (NFD): in file names created on a Mac and in some documents, the syllable ‘한’ may be stored as three separate jamo, ㅎ·ㅏ·ㄴ. It looks like one character on screen but is three code points.
This tool follows the Unicode standard's ‘grapheme cluster’ rules and counts each visible unit as 1 character. So 👨👩👧 is 1 character, and so is a decomposed ‘한’. Byte counts, on the other hand, reflect every code point actually stored, so text with many emoji has far more bytes than characters.
What to check before you submit
- Check whether the guidelines state a limit with or without spaces.
- As a final check, paste your text into the submission system itself and look at the count it shows. Systems can handle line breaks differently.
- Leave a few characters of margin instead of hitting the limit exactly, so that line-break differences do not push you over.
- Avoid emoji and special characters where possible; submission systems may break them or count them differently.
Last updated: 2026-09-23