how do we define "140 characters"?

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Raffi Krikorian

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Jan 6, 2010, 12:46:19 PM1/6/10

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hi all.

a common question we get from developers is "how do we count our 140 characters?" we recognize it can be hard to figure out in a world of non-ASCII and UTF-8 characters -- you can easily get into situations where you may have two different byte sequences that represent the same thing (e.g. both "0x63 0x61 0x66 0xC3 0xA9" and "0x63 0x61 0x66 0x65 0xCC 0x81" represent café).

our wonderful international team helped us out to put together a page on the wiki entitled "Counting Characters" (https://twitterapi.pbworks.com/Counting-Characters) that should be a good reference for everybody to use when trying to figure out what Twitter means by "140".

now off to get @TheRealCount to count for us...

ps. we, the platform team, know of an outstanding issue where the API silently fails if you attempt to post a tweet with more than 140 characters. we'll be hopefully rectifying this soon.