Does a character limit include spaces?

The default is with spaces — but verify it

Nearly every application form, CMS and social platform counts spaces as characters. If the field shows a live counter like "0 / 1000", that number is the rule; match it and you are done. Whenever the two readings disagree, the counter attached to the field is always the one that decides.

The problem is a form that says "excluding spaces" or says nothing at all, because the gap between the two is larger than people expect. In Korean prose spaces account for roughly 23% of all characters, so a piece that runs 1,000 characters with spaces drops to about 770 without them. English sits in a similar range because spaces separate every word. Picking the wrong basis can leave you 200 characters off.

When there is no guidance, write to the with-spaces reading and stop at 90–95% of the limit. Paste the final text into the real form before submitting and nothing gets truncated.

Note: the without-spaces column assumes spaces make up about 23% of Korean prose, measured across 2,386 characters of the Korean copy on this site. The share varies with writing style, so check your own draft for an exact figure.

Characters and bytes are different limits

Some older systems cap input by bytes rather than characters — anything phrased as "within 2000 bytes" belongs here. Non-Latin scripts are heavily penalised by this, because a Latin letter costs one byte while a Hangul, Chinese or Japanese character costs two or three depending on the encoding.

For example "안녕하세요 반갑습니다" is 11 characters, but 31 bytes in UTF-8 and 21 bytes in EUC-KR. Under a 2,000-byte cap that leaves room for only about 860 Korean characters in UTF-8.

When a byte limit is stated, do not rely on a character counter alone — trust the live indicator on the field itself. If there is none, budget 3 bytes per non-Latin character and leave margin.

Line breaks and punctuation count too

Line breaks are the easy thing to miss. Pressing enter to separate paragraphs usually adds a character each time, so ten paragraphs quietly consume ten characters. Under byte limits a line break sometimes costs two bytes.

Full stops, commas, quotation marks and brackets are all characters as well. If you are just over the limit, trimming stray line breaks and collapsing double spaces often recovers dozens of characters without touching a single sentence.

Note: one Hangul character takes 3 bytes in UTF-8 and 2 bytes in EUC-KR (CP949). Latin letters, digits and spaces take 1 byte in both. The per-1,000 figures are approximations based on real Korean sentences that also contain spaces and punctuation.

Practical ways to fit the limit

First, draft without watching the counter and cut afterwards. Writing while counting produces stilted sentences that you end up rewriting anyway; finishing the argument first and compressing second is faster.

Second, cut connectives and intensifiers before anything else. Words like "moreover", "very" and "really" can usually go without changing the meaning, and tightening verb phrases ("was able to complete" → "completed") recovers a lot of room.

Third, always paste the final version into the actual field before submitting. Word processors and web forms routinely disagree about counts, and the submission screen is the only measure that matters.