What Is Character Count Without Spaces?
Character count without spaces measures only the non-whitespace characters in your text — letters, numbers, punctuation, and special characters. Spaces, tabs, and line breaks are excluded from the total. For the sentence "Hello, world!", the character count with spaces is 13 and without spaces is 12 (the comma and exclamation mark are included; the space between words is not).
WordCountNow displays both character counts simultaneously so you can compare them instantly without switching tools or doing manual calculations.
When Platforms Use Character Count Without Spaces
Most consumer platforms — social media, CMS tools, and ad platforms — count spaces as characters. However, there are specific contexts where character count without spaces is the relevant figure:
- Some academic citation styles: A few referencing systems specify text density in non-space characters
- Certain database fields: Some legacy database schemas define field lengths in non-space characters
- Typography and design: Designers sometimes measure content density without spaces when calculating column widths and line lengths
- East Asian languages: Languages like Chinese and Japanese have no spaces between characters, so character count and word count are effectively the same measure
Calculating Average Word Length
One practical use of character count without spaces is calculating average word length. Divide characters without spaces by word count and you get the average number of characters per word. This figure is used in readability formulas like Flesch–Kincaid, which uses average word length alongside average sentence length to estimate reading difficulty.
Simpler, shorter words make content more accessible. If your average word length is consistently above 6 characters, you may be using more complex vocabulary than your audience needs.
The Difference in Practice
For a typical 500-word blog introduction, you might have 3,100 characters with spaces and 2,600 without. The gap — around 500 spaces — reflects roughly one space per word, which is exactly what you'd expect. If the gap is significantly larger, your text may have excessive spacing or embedded formatting characters from a copy-paste.