Counting Characters

How X counts characters in Posts, including the 280-character limit, weighted code points, URL shortening, emoji and Unicode handling, and edge cases.

Posts on X can contain up to 280 characters. However, not all characters count equally—emojis, URLs, and certain Unicode ranges have special counting rules.

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Character weights

X uses a weighted character counting system. Most characters count as 1, but some count as 2:

Character type	Weight	Max characters
Latin, punctuation, common symbols	1	280
Emojis	2	140 emojis
CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)	2	140 characters
Other Unicode	2 (default)	Varies

Use the open-source twitter-text library to accurately count characters in your app.

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Emoji counting

All emojis count as 2 characters, regardless of complexity:

Emoji	Display	Character count	Unicode
👾	Single emoji	2	U+1F47E
🙋🏽	With skin tone	2	🙋 + 🏽 modifier
👨‍🎤	Combined with ZWJ	2	👨 + ZWJ + 🎤
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦	Family sequence	2	4 emojis + 3 ZWJs

Zero-width joiners (ZWJ) combine emojis visually but don’t add to the count.

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URL handling

All URLs are wrapped with t.co shortener and count as 23 characters, regardless of the original length:

https://example.com                    → 23 characters
https://example.com/very/long/path     → 23 characters

This applies to any valid URL detected in post text.

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Special cases

Content	Counting rule
@mentions in replies	Auto-populated @mentions at the start of replies don’t count
New @mentions	@mentions you add manually count normally
Media	Attached media (via official clients) counts as 0 characters
Hashtags	Count normally (# + tag text)

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Text encoding

The X API requires UTF-8 encoding. Character length is calculated using Unicode Normalization Form C (NFC).

Example with café:

Form	Bytes	Characters
NFC (composed)	c a f é	4
NFD (decomposed)	c a f e ́	5

X normalizes to NFC, so both encode to 4 characters.

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Implementation

Use the official twitter-text library for accurate character counting:

JavaScript

import { parseTweet } from 'twitter-text';

const result = parseTweet('Hello, world! 👋');
console.log(result.weightedLength); // 16
console.log(result.valid);          // true

Python

from twitter_text import parse_tweet

result = parse_tweet('Hello, world! 👋')
print(result.weightedLength)  # 16
print(result.valid)           # True

The library handles all edge cases including emoji sequences, URL detection, and Unicode normalization.

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Resources

twitter-text library

Official open-source library for text parsing.

Configuration file

Character weight definitions and Unicode ranges.