A while back I needed to count the characters of a piece of text that I needed to use as an email template within Sales Force. Unfortunately, couldn't think of a way I could do it on my macbook quickly; so I turned to the NET.
There were a couple of tools out there, but since I am a web designer, why not do it myself? and....here it is.
Character Count Online is a free online character counting tool. It's instant, easy and free.
You can copy and paste your text with the characters to count in the text area above, or you can type your characters and words into the text area. The character counter field will be updated as soon as you paste your text.