The X character limit, and how X actually counts

The post limit is weighted, which the next section explains. The profile limits behave more simply: X's help pages say a bio over 160 characters cannot be saved, and a username cannot contain spaces. The username checker tests a handle against those rules as you type.

X counts each character with a weight of 1 or 2 and adds them up. The 280 limit applies to that weighted total, not to the number of symbols you see.

• An emoji is always 2. A skin tone modifier does not add to it, and neither does a family or profession emoji built from several emoji joined together. X's documentation counts the four-person family emoji as 2.
• Accented letters count once. X normalises text before counting, so an é typed as one character or as e plus an accent both count as one.
• Styled letters usually count as 2. The bold and italic letters made by font generators are special Unicode symbols outside the ranges X weights as 1, so a word in fancy letters uses about twice the space. The font generator shows each style's count before you copy it.

Two consequences people miss. A short link such as example.com still uses 23, so shortening a URL by hand saves nothing. And a long URL costs no more than a short one, so there is no reason to trim a link that makes sense to readers. Typing a reply's mentions by hand, instead of letting X add them, does cost characters.

There are three ways to say more than 280 characters allows, and they suit different things.

• Cut it. Most drafts over the limit carry a warm-up sentence and a closing restatement. Delete both and the point usually fits. This is the option that reads best in a fast feed.
• Write a thread. Split the text into numbered posts that each make sense alone. The thread splitter breaks long text at sentence boundaries into posts that fit, so no sentence is cut in half.
• Write a longer post. X Premium subscribers can post up to 25,000 characters and use bold and italic text. X's help page notes that you can edit a longer post for an hour after sending it. Readers see the first part in the feed and tap to expand the rest, so the opening still has to earn the click.

If you build anything that composes posts, do not count with string length. JavaScript's length property counts UTF-16 code units, so it reports an emoji as 2 and a family emoji as 11, and it knows nothing about the 23 character rule for links. X's documentation recommends its open-source twitter-text library, which applies the weights, detects URLs the way X does and normalises text first.

import { parseTweet } from "twitter-text";

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

The example is the one in X's documentation: the fourteen characters before the emoji, including both spaces, weigh 1 each, and the emoji adds 2.