Characters aren't bytes
In UTF-8, ASCII characters (a–z, 0–9, basic punctuation) take one byte each, but "£" and "é" take two, "€" and "–" take three, and most emoji take four. A 255-character limit in a database column defined in bytes, such as some MySQL VARCHAR indexes or Redis keys, can fill up sooner than you expect.
Developers check byte length for HTTP cookie limits (around 4 KB), push-notification payloads, URL length and API request bodies. For the visible character count, use the character counter.
Frequently asked questions
How many bytes is the £ sign?
2 bytes in UTF-8 (C2 A3).
Why is UTF-16 shown?
JavaScript and Windows store strings as UTF-16 internally.
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