X (Twitter) Message Validation

This page describes how characters counts are calculated when sending an alert with the X (Twitter) Channel enabled.

X uses a weighted character counting system that differs significantly from simple character counting used for other alerting channels. Instead of counting each character equally, X assigns different "weights" to characters based on their complexity and display requirements.

• Complex characters such as emojis, Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters, and many other Unicode characters count as 2 units each.
• URLs are automatically shortened by X and count as 23 characters regardless of their actual length.

This weighted system means that a tweet containing emojis or non-Latin text will reach the character limit much faster than plain English text, even though it may appear shorter visually.  This is why you may notice discrepancies between Twitter's character count and counts for other alerting channels.

More from X: https://docs.x.com/resources/fundamentals/counting-characters