Frequently Asked Questions
Why is byte size different from character count?
Character count measures the number of code points in the text. Byte size measures how many bytes the text occupies when encoded as UTF-8. ASCII characters (like a–z, 0–9) use 1 byte each. However, many characters — accented letters, emoji, and characters from non-Latin scripts — require 2 to 4 bytes in UTF-8. So a 10-character string with emoji may be 30+ bytes.
What are unique characters?
Unique characters is the count of distinct characters (code points) that appear in the text, regardless of how many times each appears. For example, "hello world" has 8 unique characters: h, e, l, o, space, w, r, d. This is useful for understanding the character set of a text or for compression analysis.