Text Size Calculator

The byte size of a text string depends on the character encoding used to represent it. In ASCII, every character is exactly 1 byte, and only 128 characters are supported. In UTF-8 (the dominant encoding of the web), ASCII characters remain 1 byte each, but characters outside the basic ASCII range use 2–4 bytes. Emoji, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and many other characters require 3–4 bytes in UTF-8. In UTF-16 (used internally by JavaScript, Java, and Windows), most characters are 2 bytes, but supplementary characters (including most emoji) require 4 bytes. Understanding encoding byte sizes is critical for database column sizing (MySQL VARCHAR limits are in bytes for utf8mb4), network buffer allocation, and ensuring strings don't exceed API payload limits.