Twitter (X) character counter

X doesn't count characters one for one. Its developer page "Counting characters" (read Nov 1, 2026) says posts can contain up to 280 characters and gives each character a weight:

• Latin letters, punctuation and common symbols weigh 1, so 280 of them fit.
• Every URL counts as 23, whatever its real length, because X wraps links in its t.co shortener.
• All emoji count as 2, "regardless of complexity". A skin-tone thumbs-up and a four-person family emoji are both 2.
• Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters weigh 2, so a post fits 140 of them.
• Other Unicode characters default to a weight of 2.
• Text is normalized to Unicode NFC before counting, so an accented letter counts once whether it was typed as one character or as a letter plus an accent mark.

Each number below was computed with the same function this counter and our API use, xWeightedLength in our codebase. Compare the weighted count with the plain length a generic counter would show.

• The sample in the box, "Shipping webhooks today 🚀 Docs: https://example.com/docs/webhooks": 65 characters plain, 56 weighted. The 33-character URL counts 23 and the rocket counts 2.
• "Docs: https://example.com" and "Docs: " followed by a 95-character tracking URL both weigh 29. Long links cost nothing extra.
• "こんにちは" (five Japanese characters) weighs 10.
• "Hello 👋" weighs 8: six for the letters and space, two for the emoji.
• "👨‍👩‍👧‍👦" is seven code points joined into one family emoji, and it weighs 2.
• 280 plain letters weigh exactly 280, the limit.

Most surprises come from characters outside the weight-1 ranges. Our counter gives weight 1 to code points U+0000 to U+10FF (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew and more) and to the space, dash, quote and prime ranges of General Punctuation. Everything else weighs 2, following X's rule that other Unicode defaults to 2:

• Unicode bold and italic letters. "𝗕𝗼𝗹𝗱" weighs 8, while "Bold" weighs 4. A bolded sentence from the LinkedIn text formatter, "Shipped: webhooks for every post.", goes from 33 characters to a weight of 60.
• The single ellipsis character. "Wait…" weighs 6, while "Wait..." with three periods weighs 7. The ellipsis character weighs 2.
• Curly quotes and the em dash weigh 1. "“Quoted” — dash" weighs 15, the same as its plain length.
• Underlined or struck-through text made with combining marks counts each marked letter as 2.

The same X page says two things are free. Media attached through official clients counts as 0 characters, so images don't eat into the text. And auto-populated @mentions at the start of a reply don't count; mentions you type into the text yourself count like any other characters.

This counter measures the text you paste. It doesn't know whether your post will be a reply, so if you paste the auto-added @handles of a reply, it counts them. Leave them out to match what X will count. This page covers the standard 280-character limit that X's developer docs describe; we haven't verified the separate rules for longer posts on paid X accounts, so the counter doesn't model them.

A link always counts 23 in the text. Through the X API it also changes the price. X's pricing page (read Nov 1, 2026) lists post creation at $0.015 per request and $0.200 for a post that contains a URL. X notes that prices are subject to change.

At 10 posts a day for 30 days, that is $4.50 a month without links and $60.00 a month if every post has one. The counter shows a warning when your draft contains a link, and our API returns the warning x_link_cost on the created post for the same reason. Our X API pricing page has the full cost breakdown.

We'd rather tell you the edge cases than claim a perfect match:

• Only text starting with http:// or https:// is treated as a URL. If you type a bare domain like example.com, X may still turn it into a link and count it as 23. Include the scheme to be certain of the count.
• A trailing period, comma or closing parenthesis right after a URL is counted as ordinary text, not as part of the link, so a sentence that ends in a link counts the way it reads.

Our API counts X posts with the same function before anything is sent. A draft over 280 weighted characters fails preflight with text_too_long, a message like "Text is 312 characters; X allows 280." and the exact number to cut. When one post goes to several networks, set platform_options.x.text to a shorter version for X and keep the full text for Bluesky and LinkedIn; see cross-posting. X posting is live. The rules are on our X character limit page.