How are characters counted?

The tool iterates over the text by Unicode code point rather than by UTF-16 unit, so accented letters and most emoji are counted as a single character instead of being split apart.

How are whitespace characters shown?

Invisible characters are labelled in the table as (space), (tab), (newline), or (carriage return) so you can see their counts. You can also hide them entirely with the ignore-whitespace option.

What is character frequency analysis used for?

It is the classic first step in breaking simple substitution ciphers, where the most common ciphertext letter likely maps to E in English. It is also handy for spotting unexpected characters or padding in data.

How are ties in the count broken?

Characters that occur the same number of times are ordered by their Unicode code point. This keeps the table deterministic so the same input always produces the same ordering.

Character Frequency Map

A character frequency map counts how often every distinct character appears in a piece of text and presents the result as a sorted table. It is a staple of classical cryptanalysis and a quick way to audit the makeup of any string.

How it works

The tool walks the text one code point at a time and tallies each character in a map, then sorts the results:

for each codePoint in text:
    if ignoreWhitespace and char is whitespace: skip
    if caseInsensitive: char = char.toLowerCase()
    counts[char] += 1
sort rows by count desc, then by code point asc

Iterating by code point with a for...of loop means surrogate pairs such as emoji are handled correctly. Whitespace characters are given readable labels so their counts are visible.

Example and notes

In Mississippi, the character s and i each appear four times, so they top the table, while M and p follow. For frequency analysis of a cipher, turn on case-insensitive matching and ignore whitespace, then compare the top characters against the expected English letter frequencies (e, t, a, o, i, n).