What is tashkeel and why exclude it?

Tashkeel (harakat) are the small vowel and pronunciation marks placed above or below Arabic letters, such as fatha, damma, kasra, shadda, and sukun. They are separate Unicode combining characters, so vocalised text has more characters than the same text unvocalised. Excluding them counts the base letters only.

Which characters count as diacritics here?

The Arabic combining marks in the range U+064B to U+0652 (fathatan, dammatan, kasratan, fatha, damma, kasra, shadda, sukun), the superscript alef U+0670, and the Quranic annotation marks U+06D6 to U+06ED are treated as tashkeel. The tatweel (kashida, U+0640) stretching character is removed too.

Does it count bytes as well as characters?

Yes. It reports the UTF-8 byte length, which matters for SMS, database column limits, and APIs. Most Arabic letters take two bytes in UTF-8, so the byte count is usually about double the character count.

Both ways. The tool shows total characters including spaces and a separate count excluding all whitespace, so you can match whichever limit you are checking against.

Does it modify my text?

No. Stripping is applied only to compute the diacritic-free counts; the text in the box is never changed. Everything runs locally in your browser and nothing is uploaded.

Arabic Character Counter

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Arabic text can carry tashkeel — the harakat vowel and pronunciation marks like fatha, damma, kasra, shadda, and sukun. Because these are separate Unicode combining characters, the same sentence has a larger character count when it is fully vocalised than when it is written plain. This counter lets you count both ways and also reports UTF-8 bytes, which is what SMS gateways and database columns actually limit.

How it works

Characters are counted with JavaScript’s Unicode-aware string handling. When you enable Exclude tashkeel, the tool removes these code points before counting:

Harakat U+064B–U+0652: fathatan, dammatan, kasratan, fatha, damma, kasra, shadda, sukun.
Superscript alef U+0670 and the Quranic annotation marks U+06D6–U+06ED.
Tatweel / kashida U+0640, the stretching character used only for justification.

Bytes are computed as the UTF-8 length using TextEncoder, so you see the real on-the-wire size. Most Arabic letters occupy two bytes in UTF-8, so a line of Arabic is typically about twice as many bytes as characters.

Example

The vocalised word:

مُحَمَّدٌ

contains the four base letters م ح م د plus several harakat. With tashkeel included the character count is higher; with Exclude tashkeel enabled it counts as the base letters only. The byte count reflects UTF-8 encoding either way.

Notes

Stripping never alters the text in the box — it only changes the count.
Use the byte count for SMS segment planning and VARCHAR/NVARCHAR limits, and the diacritic-free character count for word-processing length checks.