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.
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.
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 |
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.
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) |
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 |
Implementation
Use the official twitter-text library for accurate character counting:
import { parseTweet } from 'twitter-text';
const result = parseTweet('Hello, world! 👋');
console.log(result.weightedLength); // 16
console.log(result.valid); // true
from twitter_text import parse_tweet
result = parse_tweet('Hello, world! 👋')
print(result.weightedLength) # 16
print(result.valid) # True
Resources
