Specific Character Counter

Count how many times a character appears in your text. Type one character or several, such as a letter, a symbol, an emoji or a space, and the specific character counter shows each count, its share of the text and the lines it appears on, with every match highlighted.

Letters, symbols and emoji
Several at once
Highlights every match

Characters to count Each character is counted on its own. Use commas to count a sequence like “ing”, and type “space”, “tab” or “comma” to count those.

Your text 0 words · 0 characters

Match caseIgnore accents (e also finds é)

Open file

Stays on this device

Where each character appears

Every match is highlighted; each character or sequence gets its own colour.

Your text appears here with the matches highlighted.

Count for each character

How many times each character or sequence appears, with its share of all characters and its Unicode code point.

Type the characters to count in the box above.

How to count a specific character

Counting one or more characters takes three steps.

Type the characters to count

Type aeiou to count each vowel, @# to count those symbols, or a single emoji. To count a sequence such as “ing”, separate items with commas: ing, tion.
Paste your text

The counts appear as you type, one row per character.
Check the matches

Each character’s count, share of the text and Unicode code point, with every match highlighted in its own colour.

Example

In the sample, “@” appears 3 times, “#” twice and “e” 12 times. Type “space” in the box to count the spaces too.

Count characters in a sample

How to enter the characters you want to count

The box understands a few simple patterns.

Type this	It counts
aeiou	a, e, i, o and u, each on its own row
@#$	the @, # and $ symbols
ing, tion	the sequences “ing” and “tion”
space	spaces (also: tab, comma, line break, nbsp)
,	commas
😀	that emoji, counted as one character

Matching ignores case unless you tick “Match case”. Tick “Ignore accents” to count é and è along with e.

Characters that look the same but aren’t

Text copied from different places often mixes look-alike characters. Count them separately to find the odd one out.

Looks like	Characters	Code points
Apostrophe	' and ’	U+0027 and U+2019
Quotation marks	" and “ ”	U+0022 and U+201C, U+201D
Dash	- – —	U+002D, U+2013, U+2014
Three dots	... and …	3 × U+002E and U+2026
Space	normal and non-breaking space	U+0020 and U+00A0
Letter a	Latin a and Cyrillic а	U+0061 and U+0430

The Unique Character Counter lists every distinct character with its code point, which makes look-alikes easy to spot.

Count a character in Excel, Python or JavaScript

If you need the same count inside a spreadsheet or a program, these formulas count the letter “a” in some text.

Where	Formula	Notes
Excel or Google Sheets	=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"a",""))	Case-sensitive. Wrap A1 in LOWER() to ignore case.
Python	text.count("a")	Case-sensitive. Use text.lower().count("a") to ignore case.
JavaScript	text.split("a").length - 1	Counts UTF-16 units, so emoji need a different approach.

What the specific character counter shows

Every character you enter gets its own results.

#
Count

How many times each character or sequence appears.
%
Share

Each character’s share of all the characters in your text.
≡
Lines

How many lines contain at least one match, and where the first match is.
▮
Highlights

Every match marked in your text, in a different colour for each character.