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yutils
Example

Input

Paste a 1,200-character cover letter

Output

Characters (with spaces) 1,200 · (without) 1,043 · words 312 · sentences 24 · paragraphs 5 · UTF-8 bytes 3,180

Note

Application forms often cap length "including spaces", so both counts are shown side by side. A legacy byte count (2 bytes per Korean character) is listed separately for older systems.

Usage / FAQ

When to use

  • Meet an "N characters including/excluding spaces" limit on an application form
  • Check the length of a report or assignment
  • Estimate reading time for a blog post
  • Trim copy that has a hard limit, like a social post or a meta description
  • Verify text fits a database column using its UTF-8 byte length

FAQ

Q.With or without spaces — which one counts?
A.It depends on the form. Many application forms count characters including spaces, others state "excluding spaces" explicitly. Both are shown at once, so check the wording of the requirement itself.
Q.How are words counted?
A.By splitting on whitespace. For languages that separate words with spaces this matches intuition, but for Korean it counts spacing units (eojeol) rather than linguistic words — "학교에 간다" counts as 2 — so the numbers are not directly comparable across languages.
Q.Why are there two byte counts?
A.A Korean character is 3 bytes in UTF-8, but many legacy Korean systems count it as 2 bytes (EUC-KR style). Both are shown so you can match whichever limit your system uses.
Q.What reading speed is the estimate based on?
A.A deliberately conservative 200 words per minute. Meta-analysis puts average silent reading of English around 238 wpm, but technical or unfamiliar material reads slower, so the estimate leaves headroom.
Fun facts

  • Counting "words" is harder in some languages than others. Korean, Chinese and Japanese don't put spaces between words, so the boundaries aren't self-evident — Unicode handles this in a dedicated standard (UAX #29 Text Segmentation), and the browser's Intl.Segmenter is an implementation of it.

    Unicode — UAX #29 Text Segmentation

  • The familiar "words per minute" figure was pinned down more recently than you'd think. A 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies put average silent reading of English at 238 words per minute (183 when reading aloud) — below the 300 wpm often quoted.

    Journal of Memory and Language — Brysbaert (2019)

  • In any language, word frequency falls off almost exactly in inverse proportion to rank: the most common word appears about twice as often as the second, three times as often as the third. George Zipf described this in the 1930s, and it still underpins how tokenizer vocabularies are designed.

    Wikipedia — Zipf's law

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