Twitter Character Counter

X does not count characters the way anything else does, and an ordinary counter will tell you a post fits when it does not. Two rules account for almost all of the difference.

Links are the first. Every link counts as exactly twenty-three characters regardless of its real length, because X shortens all of them. A hundred-and-twenty-character tracking URL costs you twenty-three — which is good news, and completely invisible to a counter that just measures the string.

The second is character weighting. Anything outside the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and general-punctuation ranges counts as two, so a post in Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Hindi reaches the limit at a hundred and forty characters rather than two hundred and eighty. Emoji count as two as well, and are counted as whole symbols: a family emoji is one character to a reader and up to eleven code units to a naive counter, which would report twenty-two for one visible character.

Both rules are implemented here, and the difference between the real count and the plain character count is shown whenever they diverge, with the reason.

When a post is too long, being told by how much is only half an answer. The other half is how many posts a thread would take, which is what you are actually going to do about it — so that is shown too.