Word Counter
Count characters (with/without spaces), words, and lines in real time. Perfect for articles, reports, and any writing task.
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Characters (with spaces)
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Characters (no spaces)
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Words
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Lines
How to use the Word Counter
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Type or paste your text into the text area.
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Character count (with/without spaces), word count, and line count update instantly as you type — no button to press.
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Use 'Copy results' to copy the statistics to your clipboard, or 'Clear' to reset the input.
Features
- ✓Real-time counting: Results update instantly as you type — no button to press.
- ✓Multilingual support: Uses the Intl.Segmenter API to accurately count words in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and other languages that don't use spaces as word delimiters.
- ✓4 metrics at once: Character count (with spaces), character count (no spaces), word count, and line count — all on one screen.
- ✓100% browser-based: Your text is never sent to any server, keeping personal or sensitive content completely private.
FAQ
Q. Can it accurately count Japanese or Chinese words?
A. Yes. The Intl.Segmenter API performs language-aware word segmentation for Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and other non-space-separated languages. Browsers that don't support Segmenter automatically fall back to space-based counting.
Q. Is there a character limit?
A. No. You can process long documents, novels, reports, or large data files without any restriction.
Q. Can I use it to check social media character limits?
A. Yes. It's ideal for checking Twitter/X's 280-character limit, Instagram captions, email lengths, and any other platform character restrictions.
Q. How are spaces and line breaks counted?
A. Characters (with spaces) counts every space, tab, and newline as one character. Characters (no spaces) excludes all whitespace — only visible characters are counted. Line count equals the number of newline characters plus one.
Q. Are HTML tags or Markdown syntax included in the count?
A. Yes. The tool counts the raw text as typed, so HTML tags (<p>, <br>, etc.) and Markdown syntax (#, **, -, etc.) are each counted as individual characters. To count only the visible content, paste the plain text without any markup.
Technical Deep Dive: How Character Counting Works
JavaScript strings are internally represented as UTF-16 sequences, so str.length actually returns the number of code units, not the number of visible characters. Emoji and characters above U+FFFF — such as '😀' (U+1F600) — are encoded as surrogate pairs (two UTF-16 code units), so "😀".length evaluates to 2. This tool uses [...str].length (spread iteration over Unicode code points) to count surrogate pairs as a single character, matching the user's intuitive expectation.
Word segmentation uses the Intl.Segmenter API, standardized in ECMA-402. Unlike English, where words are delimited by spaces, languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Thai require morphological analysis. The browser's built-in language engine segments text at the appropriate granularity (granularity: 'word'). For example, the Japanese sentence '東京タワーが好きだ' is split into five words — '東京', 'タワー', 'が', '好き', 'だ' — a precision that simple space-based splitting cannot achieve.
Line count is calculated as the number of newline characters '\n' (LF) plus one. On Windows, the '\r\n' (CRLF) line ending is normalized to '\n' before counting, eliminating OS-specific inconsistencies. An empty text area still returns a line count of 1 (representing one empty line).
The 'no-spaces' character count strips all whitespace using the regular expression /[\s\u3000]/g, which covers ASCII spaces (U+0020), full-width Japanese spaces (U+3000), tabs (U+0009), and all newline variants. This ensures full-width spaces common in Japanese text are excluded alongside standard ASCII whitespace.
Security & Privacy Guarantee
This tool runs entirely client-side inside your browser. Text entered into the textarea is captured by React's onChange event handler and processed using only JavaScript string functions — no HTTP requests are made at any point. Your input never travels over any network.
You can safely use this tool with confidential documents, legal texts, personal data, source code, or draft manuscripts that you would not want sent to an external server. To verify this yourself, open your browser's DevTools Network tab while typing — you will see zero network requests generated.
All text data lives exclusively in browser memory. Closing or refreshing the page automatically clears everything. This service never logs or analyses the content of what you type.
Practical Examples, Cautions, and Common Mistakes
Examples
- Check article titles, meta descriptions, and social posts before publishing.
- Verify application essays, reports, and form answers against length limits.
- Compare original and translated text length before deciding whether to summarize.
Cautions
- Counting rules differ by platform, so always confirm the final submission rule.
- Emoji and combined characters may be counted differently by external services.
- Line breaks and full-width spaces can change totals depending on the metric you use.
Common Mistakes
- Optimizing only for character count while ignoring readability and search intent.
- Counting copied text with extra signatures, spaces, or pasted boilerplate included.
- Comparing Japanese character counts and English word counts as if they were equivalent.