Does Traditional Chinese cost more bytes than Simplified?

In UTF-8 both cost 3 bytes per Han character, so the per-character cost is the same. Differences come only from how many characters a phrase uses, not from the script being Traditional or Simplified.

How does UTF-8 compare with Big5?

Big5, the legacy Taiwan encoding, stores most Traditional characters in 2 bytes, while UTF-8 uses 3. UTF-8 is larger per character but covers all of Unicode and is the modern standard for web and databases. This tool measures UTF-8.

Why count bytes instead of characters?

Storage limits, SMS segment sizes, and protocol caps are measured in bytes. A field that holds 255 bytes only fits about 85 Traditional Chinese characters, since each takes 3 bytes. Counting bytes avoids silent truncation.

How accurate is the byte count?

It uses the browser's TextEncoder, which produces standards-compliant UTF-8 — the exact bytes your server or database stores. The number matches production rather than approximating it.

What about rare Hong Kong characters?

Some Cantonese and Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set glyphs live in Unicode planes above U+FFFF and take 4 bytes in UTF-8. The breakdown table counts these in the 4-byte band so the total stays accurate.

Traditional Chinese UTF-8 Byte Counter

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Traditional Chinese — used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau — costs the same three bytes per Han character in UTF-8 as Simplified Chinese. This tool encodes your text with the browser’s real UTF-8 encoder so you can size database columns, SMS segments, and JSON payloads with confidence.

How it works

UTF-8 encodes each character in one to four bytes depending on its Unicode code point:

U+0000 – U+007F   → 1 byte   (ASCII letters, digits)
U+0080 – U+07FF   → 2 bytes  (Latin accents, Greek, Cyrillic)
U+0800 – U+FFFF   → 3 bytes  (Traditional Han, CJK)
U+10000 and above → 4 bytes  (rare HK supplementary chars, emoji)

The tool feeds your text through TextEncoder for an exact byte total, then groups characters into bands so you can see where the weight comes from.

Example and tips

The phrase 臺灣 (“Taiwan”) is 2 characters but 6 bytes. Add the English word Taipei and you get 9 characters but 13 bytes, because the seven ASCII characters cost 1 byte each. When you migrate a legacy Big5 dataset to UTF-8, expect Traditional text to grow by roughly 50 percent in byte size, so re-check any byte-limited column lengths before importing.