How to count characters in a string in JavaScript
Łukasz Holeczek
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Counting characters in strings is essential for validation, text analysis, character limits, and implementing features like text counters or input constraints in JavaScript applications.
With over 25 years of experience in software development and as the creator of CoreUI, I’ve implemented character counting extensively in components like textarea inputs, tweet composers, form validation, and text analytics where knowing exact character counts enhances user experience and data processing.
From my extensive expertise, the most direct and efficient solution is using the built-in length property, which provides instant access to the character count.
This approach is simple, performant, and works consistently across all JavaScript environments without any additional processing.
Use the length property to count the number of characters in a string.
const text = 'Hello World'
const characterCount = text.length
// Result: 11
The length property returns the total number of characters in the string, including letters, numbers, spaces, and special characters. In this example, 'Hello World'.length returns 11 because there are 11 characters total (including the space between words). The count includes all visible and invisible characters like spaces, tabs, and line breaks. For Unicode characters, each character unit is counted as 1, though some complex characters (like emojis) might be composed of multiple character units.
Best Practice Note:
This is the same approach we use in CoreUI components for implementing character limits in text inputs, validation feedback, and progress indicators across our component ecosystem.
For counting visible characters only, remove whitespace first: text.replace(/\s/g, '').length. To count words instead of characters, use text.split(' ').length. Be aware that some emojis and special Unicode characters may count as multiple characters due to surrogate pairs in JavaScript’s UTF-16 encoding.
