Why do characters and bytes disagree?

UTF-8 uses one byte for ASCII and up to four for everything else. Twenty Japanese characters can be sixty bytes, which is why they fail to fit a VARCHAR(20) declared in bytes.

How is reading time calculated?

From word count at roughly 230 words per minute — a rough average, not a measurement of your audience.

Word & Character Counter

Count words, characters, lines, bytes and reading time.

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About this tool

Counts characters, words, sentences, paragraphs and bytes. Characters and bytes differ for anything outside ASCII — a UTF-8 character can occupy up to four bytes, which is what matters when a database column limit is measured in bytes.

Limitations

Character count uses Unicode code points, so an emoji counts once even though it may occupy several UTF-16 units.

Questions

Why do characters and bytes disagree?: UTF-8 uses one byte for ASCII and up to four for everything else. Twenty Japanese characters can be sixty bytes, which is why they fail to fit a VARCHAR(20) declared in bytes.
How is reading time calculated?: From word count at roughly 230 words per minute — a rough average, not a measurement of your audience.

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